Predictive Policing

The tide of reckoning on systemic racism and police brutality that has been sweeping through institutions — including scientific ones — has reached universities’ normally reclusive mathematics departments. A group of mathematicians in the United States has written a letter calling for their colleagues to stop collaborating with police because of the widely documented disparities in how US law-enforcement agencies treat people of different races and ethnicities. They concentrate their criticism on predictive policing, a maths-based technique aimed at stopping crime before it occurs. The letter, dated June, 15 is addressed to the trade journal Notices of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), and comes in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and around the world, sparked by the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May. More than 1,400 researchers have now joined the call.