Topical news and op-ed articles | Predictive policing / Big data analysis

2015-04-23 | New York Daily News | Rich Schapiro | Baltimore police did not need ‘probable cause’ to arrest Freddie Gray: lawyer

A black man was arrested for being in a "high crime area" and running. While in police custody, he suffered a fatal spinal injury, and died.
2014-12-15 | NextCity.org | Christopher Moraff | The Problem With Some of the Most Powerful Numbers in Modern Policing

The problem for reporters and policymakers evaluating the efefctiveness of predictive policing, is that the vast majority of what we know about predictive policing comes from data released unilaterally by individual police agencies, or by the firms peddling software to them. This not only makes it hard to compare results from city to city, but raises serious questions of data reliability.
2014-10-08 | Telegraph | Sophie Curtis | Sir Tim Berners-Lee calls for new model for privacy on the web

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has called for new model for privacy on the web, whereby people are the legal owners of their data and have full control over how it is used.
2014-07-15 | Huffington post | Andrew Guthrie Ferguson | Big Data Policing in the Big Apple

Op-ed where law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson raises five key questions that " that concerned citizens should ask about the new technology".
2014-03-28 | Financial Times | Tim Harford | Big data: are we making a big mistake?

An op-ed criticizing the theory-free aspect of Big-Data analysis.
2014-02-27 | ACLU | Chris Calabrese | When Big Data Becomes a Civil Rights Problem
2014-02-25 | ACLU | Jay Stanley | Chicago Police “Heat List” Renews Old Fears About Government Flagging and Tagging
2014-02-19 | The Verge | Matt Stroud | The minority report: Chicago's new police computer predicts crimes, but is it racist?
2014-01-15 | Prospect.org | Virginia Eubanks | Want to Predict the Future of Surveillance? Ask Poor Communities

Poor and working-class Americans already live in the surveillance future. The revelations that are so scandalous to the middle-class data profiling, PRISM, tapped cellphones–are old news to millions of low-income Americans, immigrants, and communities of color. To be smart about surveillance in the New Year, we must learn from the experiences of marginalized people in the U.S.
2013-12-12 | CBS46.com | Will Frampton | After four months, Norcross police happy with predictive policing

Four months after police in Norcross implemented a software program that predicts where crimes are likely to occur each day, they say the crime numbers in that time period suggest the program is working.