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Police To Test App That Assesses Suspects (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Police in Durham are preparing to go live with an artificial intelligence (AI) system designed to help officers decide whether or not a suspect should be kept in custody, BBC is reporting. The system classifies suspects at a low, medium or high risk of offending and has been tested by the force. It has been trained on five years' of offending histories data. One expert said the tool could be useful, but the risk that it could skew decisions should be carefully assessed. Data for the Harm Assessment Risk Tool (Hart) was taken from Durham police records between 2008 and 2012. The system was then tested during 2013, and the results -- showing whether suspects did in fact offend or not -- were monitored over the following two years. Forecasts that a suspect was low risk turned out to be accurate 98% of the time, while forecasts that they were high risk were accurate 88% of the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(Okay it's not quite AI assessing of a subject but can this type of AI assist be far behind?)
Done properly, this could be used as a way to prevent profiling. An algo can only make decisions based on the data provided to it. If race isn't provided as an input, it won't affect the decision. Humans can't make the same claim, as prejudices can sneak into our decisions unconsciously.
There are so many ways that the algorithm can introduce bias, even if race isn't provided as an input, if other factors that may be highly correlated by race are (e.g., home zip code, occupation, income, etc.).
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
I thought the idea was to detain people if they had already committed a crime, so I'm a little disturbed at the idea of holding them because you think they are likely to offend in future. If we are going to change the way we do these things, we will need to revamp our entire legal system (which I think would be a terrible mistake).