Last month, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a landmark policy putting in place long-overdue requirements on how federal agencies can – and cannot – use artificial intelligence.
Here are our main takeaways on what it means for law enforcement.
The Policing Project at NYU School of Law, the global law firm Jones Day, the law firm Lawrence & Bundy, and Canfield Law LLC have filed an appeal to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals challenging the dismissal of a civil rights lawsuit against Clayton County police. A range of groups and individuals, including law enforcement officials; Tyler Perry, Jamie Foxx, and other prominent Black actors; empirical scholars; Cato Institute; NAACP Legal Defense Fund; Institute for Justice; ACLU of Georgia, have filed amicus briefs in support of the appeal.
This week, we’re highlighting testimony we provided to the New York City Council on how the NYPD has skirted democratic accountability in deploying intrusive policing technologies.
During this year’s legislative session, we provided input and drafting support on 36 pieces of legislation or regulations across 12 states. Notably, 22 of these engagements came at the express invitation of state or local partners, including both advocates and lawmakers. The most popular topics were use of force, officer decertification, and data collection and transparency, but legislators also sought to address a wide range of others, from warrant reform to police use of robots, and more.
Policing Project Co-Founders Barry Friedman and Maria Ponomarenko joined a coalition of law school faculty — each of whom runs or is associated with a center devoted to the practice of policing and the criminal justice system — in releasing a list of urgently-needed reforms to address enduring problems in American policing.
Too often, we have focused on “police reform” and “police accountability” in moments like these. Yet, the very fact that we are here once again—as we were after rioting in the 1960s, or after Ferguson in 2014—suggests that police reform and police accountability as we have understood and implemented them simply are not working.
Police are tasked with ensuring public safety during extreme events and emergencies. But during unprecedented times–like we’re seeing now with the novel COVID-19 pandemic–many tried and tested methods for community engagement and outreach are breaking down. How should policing agencies adapt to meet the needs of vulnerable populations?
Following his return from Belgium where he co-hosted a round-table on facial recognition legislation on both sides of the Atlantic, Policing Project founder Barry Friedman penned a new op-ed for Just Security exploring the differences in European and American approaches to regulating the tech and the urgent need for greater action.
Automated License Plate Readers are one of the most widely used law enforcement systems in existence. Unfortunately, because of lack of data and study, we know very little about how large the benefits or costs are—all the more reason every community should do its best to be informed about how its law enforcement is using ALPRs.
To conclude our Fall 2019 salon series, the Policing Project and the Information Law Institute hosted a discussion of the regulation of facial recognition. As more jurisdictions are using the tech to aid law enforcement, there are sharp societal disagreements on where to draw the lines between acceptable and unacceptable uses.
This fall, the Policing Project kicked off our Tech Salon Series with two events. Our salons, made possible by support from Microsoft, enable us to vet our projects and discuss pressing issues around law enforcement’s use of technologies with a diverse set of experts, including privacy advocates, technology vendors, police chiefs, academics, legal experts, community leaders, and government officials.
According to the U.S. Transgender Survey, among transgender people who interacted with police in the past year and said officers were aware they were transgender, 58% reported some form of mistreatment. Our latest blog explores how some police departments and trans-rights groups are developing better policies to address this issue.
The Policing Project recently hosted members of the Chicago Police Department during their visit to New York to learn more about NYPD’s Neighborhood Policing, the neighborhood-focused collaborative policing philosophy on which the Policing Project’s Chicago Neighborhood Policing Initiative is modeled.
The Policing Project submitted an amicus brief in support of certiorari asking the United States Supreme Court to overturn a decision of the Nebraska Supreme Court that permitted a police stop of a vehicle, in the absence of reasonable suspicion, on the grounds that the stop was merely information-seeking.
Face recognition technology is increasingly being used by government agencies, particularly law enforcement, but while regulation of the technology is increasing, the rollout has been far from uniform. The Policing Project, with help from the Information Law Institute, conducted a review of enacted and proposed regulation across the U.S. and Canada, culminating in our new resource that analyzes trends in legislation and provides a table of nearly 200 proposed and enacted laws.
Police officers in the U.S. pull over at least 50,000 drivers every day, making the traffic stop the most common interaction between the public and police. But despite the frequency, there is a lot we don't know about stops and their effects, in part because stop data collection laws are not mandated in most states, and even when they do exist, the laws are far from perfect.
