Charlton McIlwain writes:
In the early 1960s, the Black civil rights revolution raged in the streets across the United States. This quest to build a more racially just and equitable society happened right alongside the computer revolution. Soon the two fused with the advent of the Police Beat Algorithm, a software system to help police departments collect crime data and determine where to focus crime-fighting efforts—and one that that would end up deeply affecting our society from the 1960s up through the present. Why did the Police Beat Algorithm come to exist? What problems prompted the need for its formulation? Who developed it, and to what ends? The answers to each of these questions collectively tell a story about how a little-known computational experiment laid the cornerstone for what would become today’s surveillance infrastructure—one that has deeply and negatively affected communities of color across the globe.
Read more at Slate.
h/t, Joe Cadillic