California City Bans Predictive Policing In US First

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: As officials mull steps to tackle police brutality and racism, California's Santa Cruz has become the first U.S. city to ban predictive policing, which digital rights experts said could spark similar moves across the country. "Understanding how predictive policing and facial recognition can be disportionately biased against people of color, we officially banned the use of these technologies in the city of Santa Cruz," Mayor Justin Cummings said on Wednesday. His administration will work with the police to "help eliminate racism in policing", the seaside city's first male African-American mayor said on his Facebook page, following a vote on Tuesday evening.

Used by police across the United States for almost a decade, predictive policing relies on algorithms to interpret police records, analyzing arrest or parole data to send officers to target chronic offenders, or identifying places where crime may occur. But critics says it reinforces racist patterns of policing -- low-income, ethnic minority neighborhoods have historically been overpoliced so the data shows them as crime hotspots, leading to the deployment of more police to those areas.

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