Moral Issues in Intelligence-led Policing by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Crimes & Criminals, Criminology
ISBN: 9781351864503
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

Data processing and data outputs

Data processing is a key moment, when the collaboration and competition of human beings, data, and software become observable, especially in view of the different rationalities that humans and software seem to follow at this stage. Recently, a number of analytic statements have informed the debate around the nature of algorithms and machine learning and their influence on predictive policing. In her critique of learning algorithms, Esposito has pointed to the ‘random generators’ (2013: 131) that algorithms use to identify correlations. She says the reasoning of the computer is ‘completely inaccessible to the human mind’ (Esposito 2013: 132) due to the ‘wealth of information’ (ibid.) and the computer’s processing capacities, which create a new form of web intelligence. Similar arguments about the inaccessibility of the volume of processed data are put forward by Chan and Moses (2016: 9) and by Hildebrandt (2016a). Arguments about the obscurity of the knowledge that steers the algorithms can also be found in the interview material (E, H). An additional problem identified is the assumed autonomy of the algorithm, which contributes to a widening of the gap between human and computer knowledge (H). Besides the issue of the randomness, inaccessibility and autonomy that influence and obscure the ways in which algorithms process data, a key critique is that algorithmic processing does not inquire about causality, but about correlations (Sætnan 2016; Hildebrandt 2016a). This was a problem also identified by several interviewees:

K: [The algorithm] doesn’t help you understand anything or explain anything.

F: And just to be clear: we’re only focused on predicting where and when crime is most likely to occur. We don’t predict why or how and who.

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