A decade of watching rapid change in policing and technology. Some big moments:
2011: 685,000+stops by the NYPD, mostly against young men of color.
2011: 685,000+stops by the NYPD, mostly against young men of color.
2014: Ferguson riots after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.
Brown's family calls for a body camera on every officer working the street.
2014--today: the rise and rise of police body cameras.
Police body cams are big business, mainly for one company.
Existing police tech gets better, cheaper, faster. License plate readers pop up everywhere and become time machines.
2018: the U.S. Supreme Court worries about "near perfect surveillance"
But us consumers? Our talent is buying the stuff that provides the data that can be collected, stored, analyzed and reanalyzed just because:
-we like tracking our heart rates
-we like tracking our heart rates
-we really like voice commands
-we love, love, love Google
-we really need to know who our fifth cousins once removed are
-and it's so very important to record every face at the door
It's not all gloom and doom. Slowly, some communities are calling for change.
And some police departments are engaging in real assessments.
Important work on bias in algorithms is entering popular consciousness.
What's next? Hello self-driving cars aka roving evidence gathering machines!
More seriously. The future means technology in policing (as it is everywhere) is becoming more powerful, more inscrutable, more (literally and figuratively) invisible, and thus even less accountable. Plus, it's being driven by the private sector selling the goods.
Sure--there remain some very difficult, "traditional" policing problems. Police-civilian interactions, especially if you're black or brown--can be *problematic.* Qualified immunity, use of force, all of that. But the tech stuff is hard, and needs way more attention. Stay on it.
*if you're still here,* I do these mainly for myself, but thanks for listening.
