![Digital illustration of a grid overlaid on top of a closeup grainy photograph of two police officers holding their hands behind their back. One police officer’s gun is visible in the photo. Various squares are colored in pink, purple, orange and yellow.](jpg/geolitica-lead-100-360x203.jpg)
Prediction: Bias
Predictive Policing Software Terrible At Predicting Crimes
A software company sold a New Jersey police department an algorithm that was right less than 1% of the time
Challenging technology to serve the public good.
Evelyn Larrubia worked with our talented staff of journalists to find and tell stories that show how technology and the use of data affect us all. She believes independent nonpartisan journalism is central to a healthy democracy. Evelyn left The Markup in November 2022.
She has decades of experience reporting and editing accountability and investigative journalism, including 12 years as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Her most important stories have been built on data analysis that exposed wrongs, and told through a human lens.
Before joining The Markup, she was Executive Editor of public radio’s Marketplace and, before that, Managing Editor of News and Investigations for KPCC, Los Angeles’s NPR news station.
Her work has garnered more than a dozen national journalism awards, including the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and the Scripps Howard Ursula and Gilbert Farfel Prize for Investigative Reporting. She was a 2010–11 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, and in 2017, CCNMA named her Latina Journalist of the Year.
Prediction: Bias
A software company sold a New Jersey police department an algorithm that was right less than 1% of the time
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An investigation by The Markup found that AT&T, Verizon, EarthLink, and CenturyLink disproportionately offered lower-income and least-White neighborhoods slow internet service for the same price as speedy connections they offered in other parts of town
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The ads appear as the company faces criticism for limiting content about medication abortions
Prediction: Bias
Millions of crime predictions left on an unsecured server show PredPol mostly avoided Whiter neighborhoods, targeted Black and Latino neighborhoods
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Even accounting for factors lenders said would explain disparities, people of color are denied mortgages at significantly higher rates than White people
Show Your WorkDenied
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Show Your WorkGoogle the Giant
Despite committing to dismantling systemic racism, YouTube blocks advertisers from using many racial justice and cultural identity terms to target videos for ads
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