Program helps identify violent parolees yet ignores race over concerns of racial profiling

Posted on 09. Jul, 2009 by Nathaniel Bacon in Hidden Crimes, Nathaniel Bacon, Top Stories

As Part of an attempt to fight crime, Philadelphia is now the subject of an experiment never tried in another city: A computer is forecasting who among the city’s 49,000 parolees is likeliest to rob, assault, or kill someone.

Since march, the city’s Adult Probation and Parole department has been using the system to reshuffle the way it assigns cases. Each time someone new comes through intake, a clerk enters his or her name and the computer takes just seconds to fish through a database for relevant information and deliver a verdict of high, medium, or low risk.

{snip} . . . Race mattered only a little—and so Philadelphia decided to leave it out of the equation. Berk said he thinks the model should work fine without it and the decision to ignore race minimizes concerns about racial profiling.  ARTICLE