AI’s True Role In Policing: How Solutions to Police Brutality Have Fallen Flat
Bryan Birrueta, Jamie Brusco, Nick Demarchis, Matt Levine
Police Brutality And Its Exposure To The Public
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement made its way to the forefront of American politics after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the murderer of Trayvon Martin. It is a decentralized movement that protests all racially motivated violence against black people. Since Martin’s death, BLM has shifted its focus to police and police brutality following the large count of black people killed by police each year. Because of its decentralized nature, there are many different people offering up different solutions to the problem. The most popular solutions that police forces have tried and are in the process of implementing are body cameras and more police training.
Body Cameras
Body cameras were pushed by BLM activists, believing that police would use less force if they knew they were being recorded. If excessive force was used, the body cam footage would be used against the officers in order to indict and convict them.
Early studies involving police use of body-worn cameras showed promising results. One of those studies, the Rialto study, showed that body-worn cameras reduced use-of-force incidents by 59%.¹ Politicians from both sides of the political aisle began to support the push for law enforcement to use these cameras. As a result, almost half of law enforcement agencies in the United States required body cameras by 2016.²
So how effective have body cameras been at increasing officer accountability, decreasing police shootings, and convicting police officers for their abuse of power?
The results of 70 studies have found no correlation between body-worn cameras and police behavior.³ In other words, body cameras haven’t mitigated the number of police shootings or police brutality in general. As for the accountability and conviction of officers, only 8.3% of officers have been prosecuted using evidence from body cameras.⁴ Instead, officers are using body cameras that were intended to keep them in check to prosecute citizens instead (over 90% of citizen involved cases).
There are a few reasons why body cameras aren’t working as originally intended by activists. The first is that the policies for body cameras vary between departments, allowing some officers to turn off their body cameras prematurely, as seen by the Chicago police department in the shooting of 13 year-old Adam Toledo.⁵ Furthermore, there are little to no consequences for officers failing to turn their cameras on. The most prominent example of this is the shooting of Breonna Taylor, where none of the officers that raided her apartment had their body cameras on and were not punished or discredited when testifying for doing so.
Increased Police Training
Increased police training was also pushed by activists, believing that the officers just needed to be trained better to better protect and serve the community. Funding for police training is fundamental for this idea to come to fruition.
More police training gained support through government, with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) stating that “a lack of sufficient training — and funding for training — leaves officers and the public at risk”.⁶ They ask Congress for grants and more funding to train officers on de-escalation tactics and alternatives to use of force.
Unfortunately, attempts for retraining have not done much to stop police brutality or the targeting of minorities and poor people from police.
A study that looked at the effects of police implicit bias training showed that the training did have a positive effect on the officers self-understanding of how implicit biases can lead to higher aggressiveness to certain individuals.⁷ However, it did not have any noticeable effect on their actions while on duty.
Why aren’t our solutions working?
The reason our solutions aren’t working is because the solutions that we propose and that are taken up and acknowledged by the government and people of power don’t get at the root of the problem. The root of the problem is not that police aren’t being watched or that police don’t know how to do their job well. They are doing their job well. That’s the problem.
There are many things that we can touch on, such as police culture⁸ and the militarization of the police force⁹, but we want to keep our focus on the purpose of policing.
Police are given the power to enforce the law. However, a subtler, similar power is given to them as well: the power to exercise social control.¹⁰ Social control is exerted on those deemed as a threat to the community. These people, in the eyes of police, are not part of the community to protect. They are the “other” that the community needs protection against.¹¹ The statement that “Black lives matter” implies that they do not matter. They are not part of the community. They are the “other.” Once a person is viewed as “other,” an officer will do everything they believe is right to protect the community.
AI and Policing Police
This discussion is to demonstrate the fact that there is no Artificial Intelligence system that can change the purpose of policing. In order for AI to truly be effective, it must work under a framework that is itself effective. Otherwise, the AI will only reproduce the problems BLM is trying hard to solve.
Until a societal solution to policing is found, the best thing we could do with AI is focus on giving power back to those it is constantly being taken away from. Minorities and poor people (the “other”) are constantly being surveilled by police, so we believe it is best to practice surveillance from the bottom to the top, or, as Simone Brown would call it, sousveillance (or dark sousveillance).¹²
The AI that we have created is intended to take the police killing data gathered by the community (because police departments can take years to release their reports) and use it to predict the likelihood that a police officer will kill someone based on their attributes. We hope to use this AI to inform the public about police killings and police brutality and becomes a tool to use against it. Ultimately, we hope our AI becomes useless quickly, as that would mean a powerful societal change would have likely occurred that ends police brutality and no one becomes the “other.”
References
[1]Ramirez, Eugene P. A REPORT ON BODY WORN CAMERAS. bja.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh186/files/media/document/14–005_report_body_worn_cameras.pdf.
[2]Hyland, Shelley S. Body-Worn Cameras in Law Enforcement Agencies, 2016. www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/bwclea16.pdf.
[3]Lum, Cynthia. “The Impacts of Police Body-Worn Cameras May Be Overestimated, Mason Experts Say.” George Mason University, 23 May 2019. www2.gmu.edu/news/2019–05/impacts-police-body-worn-cameras-may-be-overestimated-mason-experts-say.
[4]Merola, Linda, et al. Body Worn Cameras and the Courts: A National Survey of State Prosecutors, 2016. bja.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh186/files/media/document/bwcprosecutors.pdf.
[5]Sabella, Jen. “Why Were Police Told To Turn Off Body Cameras Minutes After Adam Toledo Shooting? It’s Standard Policy, Department Says.” Block Club Chicago, Block Club Chicago, 13 Apr. 2021, blockclubchicago.org/2021/04/12/why-were-police-told-to-turn-off-body-cameras-minutes-after-shooting-adam-toledo-its-standard-policy-police-sergeant-says/.
[6]Lhamon, Catherine E., et al. “Police Use of Force: An Examination of Modern Policing Practices.” USCCR, 2018, www.usccr.gov/pubs/briefing-reports/2020-06-05-Police-Use-of-Force.php.
[7]Worden, Robert E. The Impacts of Implicit Bias Awareness Training in the NYPD. July 2020, www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/impacts-of-implicit-bias-awareness-training-in- the-nypd.pdf.
[8]Preston, Caroline. “Police Training Is Broken. Can It Be Fixed?” The Hechinger Report, 1 Apr. 2021, hechingerreport.org/police-education-is-broken-can-it-be-fixed/.
[9]Mihm, Stephen. “The Riots of the 1960s Led to Rise in Militarization of Police.” Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg, 12 June 2020, www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-12/militarization-of-police-is-tied-to-1960s-riots-and-race.
[10]Herbert, Steve. Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department. NED — New edition ed., University of Minnesota Press, 1997. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttsj2f.
[11]Makalani, Minkah. “Black Lives Matter and the Limits of Formal Black Politics.” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 116, no. 3, 2017, pp. 529–552., doi:10.1215/00382876–3961472.
[12]Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: on the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015.
