NOW WE GOT TO WORRY ABOUT AI COPS?

Police departments are rushing headlong into machine learning. That's going to spell even more trouble for Black and brown Americans.

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IT WAS DAMN NEAR UNFATHOMABLE-THE CELL FOOTAGE my manicurist showed me a couple weeks back.

As context, she told me there'd been a murder in the apartment across the hall from hers. That the police had evacuated the complex, and while she and her children waited outside, her neighborthe Black man in whose apartment the murder had occurred-came home and insisted on entering his crib, aka the crime scene.

The footage showed officers informing dude that entering his apartment was a no go and dude hollering and pushing past them toward the taped-off area anyway, growing more belligerent with each step.

It showed the officers-all of whom looked white-hustling beside and behind dude while imploring him not to enter, at one point damn near beseeching him not to enter. The footage was remarkable for the fact that the officers' commands never equaled the volume of dude's roar, for the fact that the police didn't resort to physical force, for the irony of dude not ending up cuffed and arrested. Or worse.

What I witnessed on that phone was officers demonstrating admirable restraint-forbearance, even-which is to say I saw them treat with humanity a man whose friend had just been murdered, and this in a city (Phoenix) whose 46 police killings between 2013 and 2021 ranked second only to Los Angeles's (70).

It could've gone a tragic way. We've all seen it. We're familiar with law enforcement using excessive force, too often resulting in the deaths of Black and brown people. There's ample data on how people of color are overrepresented in arrests and convictions, on how they receive longer sentences than white people for similar crimes, on how police kill them more than they do white people. (Black people make up 13 percent of the U.S. population yet account for one in four of the people killed by police.)

Add to that pervasive and dangerous state of affairs in policing and criminal justice the proliferation of AI.

Shit.