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A Popular A.I. Tool for Police Specifically Targets Communities of Color
Racial profiling by hashtag can only lead to dangerous outcomes
A new report from The Intercept catalogs how New York-based startup Dataminr scrapes Twitter for police — and it uses almost no evidence to add people to gang member watch lists.
Here’s how reporter Sam Biddle described the workflow:
As part of a broader effort to feed information about crime to police under the general rubric of public “threats,” Dataminr staffers attempted to flag potential violent gang activity without the aid of any special algorithms or fancy software, sources said; instead they pored over thousands and thousands of tweets, posts, and pictures, looking for armed individuals who appeared to be affiliated with a gang. It’s an approach that was neither an art nor a science and, according to experts in the field, is also a surefire way of putting vulnerable men and women of color under police scrutiny or worse.
“The only thing we were using to identify them was hashtags, possibly showing gang signs, and if there was any kind of weapon in the photo,” one source told Biddle.
Dataminr was also used to surveil Black Lives Matter protesters after the killing of George Floyd, The Intercept previously reported.
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