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How bad facial recognition software gets Black people arrested

Yet another way the US justice oppresses Black and Brown communities

Ari Joury, PhD
Towards Data Science
8 min readJun 12, 2020

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People demonstrating for Black Lives Matter
Black people get mismatched more often by facial recognition software. Photo by frankie cordoba on Unsplash

The riots all over the US are reminding us, once again, of the blatant oppression of people of color by predominantly White people. But while police murders are in focus right now, we shouldn’t be forgetting about the subtler tools that the justice system uses to ruin Black lives.

For one, there are the numerous Black and Brown people who die after being arrested. While federal officials have failed to gather the data, independent resources show that the disparity is real.

Then there is the fact that people of color get harsher sentencing upon trial. To state the obvious, this is a consequence of racial bias among predominantly White criminal judges.

On top of all that, there is the fact that Black and Brown people get arrested way more often. While Black people make up 13% of the average population, they make up 33% of US prisons, as of 2017. White people, or 72% of the population, only make up 30% of prisons. Statistically speaking, a Black person is therefore six times more likely to be incarcerated than a White person.

It is therefore quite obvious that Black and Brown people get oppressed by the police and the justice…

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Towards Data Science
Towards Data Science

Published in Towards Data Science

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Ari Joury, PhD
Ari Joury, PhD

Written by Ari Joury, PhD

Founder of Wangari. Sustainable finance & ESG-financial modeling. Get all articles 3 days in advance: https://wangari.substack.com

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