Emb(race): Police and Judicial Reform and Accountability

Technology has the power to drive action. And right now, a call to action is needed to eradicate racism. Black lives matter.

We recognize technology alone cannot fix hundreds of years of racial injustice and inequality, but when we put it in the hands of the Black community and their supporters, technology can begin to bridge a gap. To start a dialogue. To identify areas where technology can help pave a road to progress.

This project is an effort to leverage technology to prevent, detect, and remediate bias and misrepresentation in the workplace, products, and society. For corporations to succeed, it is critical to have Black representation at every level.

This is one of three open source projects underway as part of the Call for Code Emb(race) Spot Challenge led by contributors from IBM and Red Hat.

Contribute to this effort

1. Engage

   • Understand the problem statements in this solution starter GitHub repository.
   • Connect with colleagues in Slack to join one of the teams working on solutions to this problem.

2. Envision

   • Imagine the measurable end result of a technology innovation for one of the problem statements.
   • Plot a path from the current situation to that outcome. You can use [Mural] (https://www.mural.co/) and Slack to collaborate.

3. Contribute

   • IBMers: Learn about open source and certify before contributing.
   • Open issues, [submit pull requests] (CONTRIBUTING.md#submitting-pull-requests), or [edit the wiki] (CONTRIBUTING.md#editing-the-wiki) for this repository.

Problem statements

1. Police interactions with the Black community disproportionately end in escalation
2. Lack of transparent and accurate data available to assess police behavioral infractions
3. [People in the Black Community are faced with harsher downstream effects] (#problem-statement-3)

Problem statement 1

Police interactions with members of the Black community disproportionately end in unnecessary and avoidable escalation.

Hills (who, what, and wow)

1. The public will have access to factual data on police behavioral infractions so that police officers can be held publicly accountable for their actions.

   • Law enforcement agencies can flag officers with behavior infractions that remain visible across jurisdictions and can use the infractions as input for relevant actions (hiring, firing, remediation, etc.)

2. Law enforcement has technology embedded in their equipment to help objectively assess accurate threat level and providesguidance on appropriate threat response in real time.

3. Law enforcement agencies have access to free technology which identifies both singular incidents and behavioral patterns so that regular data-driven evaluations of policing outcomes take place.

   • Law Enforcement agencies and governmental leadership are automatically required to respond with actions and remediation based on the evaluation reports so that they are held accountable for addressing surfaced issues within 14 days.

How tech can help

• TBD

Resources

Publications

• Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities
• Race and police killings: examining the links between racial threat and police shootings of Black Americans
• It's not depersonalization, It's emotional labor: Examining surface acting and use-of-force with evidence from the US
• Do Police Officers in the USA Protect and Serve All Citizens Equally?
• Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race–ethnicity, and sex
• Deaths Due to Use of Lethal Force by Law Enforcement
• A large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States
• To predict and serve?
• Runaway Feedback Loops in Predictive Policing

Documents and other media

• Not just George Floyd: Police departments have 400-year history of racism
• Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young Black men in America
• The Air We Breathe: Implicit Bias And Police Shootings
• Bias
• Number of people shot to death by the police in the United States from 2017 to 2020, by race
• Mapping Police Violence
• Police use of deadly force in the United States
• National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS)
• What the data really says about police and racial bias

Datasets

At this time, datasets are provided for reference only. Do not include dataset information in any solutions until further notice.

• The Stanford Open Policing Project

Problem statement 2

The lack of transparent and accurate data available to assess police behavioral infractions means police reports can be falsified and contain other inaccuracies.

Hills (who, what, and wow)

1. Law enforcement can use technology to automatically screen and expedite police reports for inherent biases while flagging incident reports for immediate review so that issues/incidents are addressed proactively with immediate consequences.
   • Internal affairs and civilians (such as witnesses) can both contribute to incident reports, creating a tamper-proof record with all accounts of the incident.
   • Third parties can access a free repository of incident reports so that police brutality, harassment or other misbehavior can be objectively analyzed and trends can be identified.

How tech can help

• Technology can be used to measure the frequency of police behavioral infractions, such as, the unnecessary use of force or other aggressive tactics, and other incidents, which disproportionately target the black community. This will allow for the identification of any inherent biases that may have been associated with an incident. This data can subsequently be used to identify malicious police practices and help to improve relationships between the police and the communities which they swear to protect and serve.

Resources

Publications

• Causal peer effects in police misconduct

Documents and other media

• Public Radio piece on transparency of police misconduct and transparency/accessibility by State
• Study finds misconduct spreads among police officers like contagion
• Contacts Between Police And The Public, 2015
• National Justice Database
• We found 85,000 cops who’ve been investigated for misconduct. Now you can read their records.

Datasets

At this time, datasets are provided for reference only. Do not include dataset information in any solutions until further notice.

• TBD

Problem statement 3

People in the Black Community are faced with harsher downstream effects (charged at higher rates, assigned more significant charges, convicted at higher rates, given longer sentences, and denied parole more often) than people of other races for similar offenses.

Hills (who, what, and wow)

1. Judges can be required to use technology that evaluates sentencing criteria enabling them to provide equitable sentencing outcomes and mitigate bias in the sentencing process.
   • The general public can access standard data repository regarding sentencing outcomes so that excessive sentencing can be identified and automatically flagged for the appeals process.

How tech can help

• TBD

Resources

References

• Black People Are Charged at a Higher Rate Than Whites. What if Prosecutors Didn’t Know Their Race?
• Machine Bias
• How We Analyzed the COMPAS Recidivism Algorithm

Publications

• Contacts Between Police and the Public, 2015
• Racial Disparity in Federal Criminal Sentences
• Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Disparities In Federal Sentencing Today
• The Growing Racial Disparity in Prison Time
• Racial Disparity
• Unequal Treatment: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Miami-Dade Criminal Justice
• From police to parole, black and white Americans differ widely in their views of criminal justice system

Documents and other media

• 13th Documentary
• Slavery gave America a fear of Black people and a taste for violent punishment. Both still define our criminal-justice system.

Datasets

At this time, datasets are provided for reference only. Do not include dataset information in any solutions until further notice.

• TBD

Support

Find help on the Support page.

License

This solution starter is made available under the Apache 2 License.