“The Computer Said So”: On the Ethics, Effectiveness, and Cultural Techniques of Predictive Policing
By Tero Karppi. 2018
38 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In this paper, I use The New York Times’ debate titled, “Can predictive policing be ethical and effective?” to examine what are seen as the key operations of predictive policing and what impacts they might have in our current culture and society. The debate is substantially focused on the ethics and effectiveness of the computational aspects of predictive policing including the use of data and algorithms to predict individual behaviour or to identify hot spots where crimes might happen. The debate illustrates both the benefits and the problems of using these techniques, and makes a strong stance in favor of human control and governance over predictive policing. Cultural techniques in the paper is used as a framework to discuss human agency and further elaborate how predictive policing is based on operations which have ethical, epistemological, and social consequences.
Subfields: Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science
How researchers see this paper
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In Safety Research
- Jessica Morley
- Luciano Floridi
- Josh Cowls
- Mariarosaria Taddeo
- Andreas Tsamados
- S. Lo Piano
- Nikita Aggarwal
- Huw Roberts
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Ethical principles in machine learning and artificial intelligence: cases from the field and possible ways forward (2020, background): “The fact these algorithms may be prone to drive further patrolling in poor neighbourhoods may result from a training bias as crimes occurring in public tend to be more frequently reported (Karppi, 2018).”
- The ethics of algorithms: key problems and solutions (2020, background): “Indeed, this approach leads to algorithmic interventions that strive to be ‘neutral’ but in doing so, it risks entrenching existing social conditions (Green and Viljoen 2020, 20), while creating the illusion of precision (Karppi 2018; Selbst et al.”