Study Shows PredPol Police Software Increases Racial Bias

The City of Oakland does not currently use the PredPol software, but public officials were considering it in 2015. In June of 2015 the Oakland Privacy Working Group, in an open letter to the city council, warned of the possible dangers of the software:

"Beyond concerns of effectiveness, the City Council must also consider civil liberties and police practice concerns that would come to fore should PredPol be used. Basically, PredPol designates "hot spots" - small areas to which police units are sent to patrol. The act of sending police to a designated small area to watch for suspicious activity will inevitably lead to those police sent there being more suspicious than usual of everyone they encounter. This will lead to more "reasonable suspicion" stops which are in fact not reasonable, leading to civil rights violations, all the more problematic because hotspots are so likely to be in minority neighborhoods."

PredPol was launched in 2012 by attorney Caleb Baskin and then Santa Cruz Councilman Ryan Coonerty, who is now a Santa Cruz County Supervisor. They raised more than $1 million to fund it originally, and significantly more has been raised to expand the company. Santa Cruz County Supervisor Zach Friend, then a police analyst with the Santa Cruz Police Department, worked to test the early PredPol software within the department in 2011. Deputy Chief of Police Steve Clark (pictured in the photo, demonstrating the use of PredPol) has spent a significant amount of time marketing the software while officially on the job at SCPD.

SCPD claims it was the first in the world to implement the predictive policing software, and the department mounted a large PR campaign to promote it. In 2013 the City of Santa Cruz announced the creation of an International PredPol Day of Action or “All Out PredPol” as they called it.

From the SCPD press release for "International PredPol Day of Action":

"The plan is to get as much positive and healthy activity and presence in each of the PredPol zones. To accomplish this, we are teaming with our public safety partners and community groups to activate these areas. On Wednesday morning, we will run the PredPol maps for the day in each of the targeted crime categories."

"Those maps will be distributed to our public safety partners and neighborhood groups Santa Cruz Neighbors and Take Back Santa Cruz. Our goal is to maximize presence in and around these areas and have a positive impact on crime and the overall quality of life. We won’t know the locations until that morning when PredPol runs the reports for that day."

Santa Cruz Neighbors and Take Back Santa Cruz are citizen based public safety groups that have both received widespread critique for promoting discriminatory politics and behavior in Santa Cruz.

Santa Cruz is not mentioned on the Wikipedia page about predictive policing, instead the page credits LAPD with first experimenting with the concept in 2008 (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_policing).

Residents all over the country must now ask themselves: In what way is PredPol targeting our communities of color, and our homeless and our poor?

In Santa Cruz we must ask what specifically is the effect of SCPD's use of PredPol on our Latino and Black communities?

Read more:

Crime-prediction tool PredPol amplifies racially biased policing, study shows
https://mic.com/articles/156286/crime-prediction-tool-pred-pol-only-amplifies-racially-biased-policing-study-shows

PredPol: An Open Letter to the Oakland City Council
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2015/06/25/18773987.php

'Predictive Policing' Company Uses Bad Stats, Contractually-Obligated Shills To Tout Unproven 'Successes'
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131031/13033125091/predictive-policing-company-uses-bad-stats-contractually-obligated-shills-to-tout-unproven-successes.shtml