Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

Mathematicians call for police work boycott

More than 1,400 researchers have signed a letter urging 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. Critics say that the data used to feed such algorithms contain racial biases, and that the ‘control conditions’ for predictive policing — ordinary policing — are racially skewed. “It is simply too easy to create a ‘scientific’ veneer for racism,” the mathematicians write.

Nature | 6 min read