National Institute of Justice

• Yet, the Department of Justice has been funding the crime surveillance and analysis technology for years and continues to do so despite criticism from researchers, privacy advocates and members of Congress.
• Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and U.S. Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., joined by five Democratic senators, called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to halt funding for predictive policing technologies in a letter issued Jan. 29, 2024.
• Predictive policing involves analyzing crime data in an attempt to identify where and when crimes are likely to occur and who is likely to commit them.
• While focused on predictive policing, the senators’ demand raises what I, a law professor who studies big data surveillance, see as a bigger issue: What is the Department of Justice’s role in funding new surveillance technologies?

The money pipeline

• Because there was grant money available to test out new theories, academics and startup companies could afford to invest in new ideas.
• Police departments also benefit from getting money to buy the new technology without having to dip into their local budgets.
• As these DOJ entities’ practices indicate, federal money not only seeds but feeds the growth of new policing technologies.
• Since 2005, the Bureau of Justice Assistance has given over $7.6 billion of federal money to state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies for a host of projects.

The questions not asked

• The Department of Justice is in the business of prosecution, so it is not surprising for it to fund prosecution tools.
• As someone who has studied predictive policing for over a decade, I can say that the questions asked by the senators were not asked in the pilot projects.
• Basic questions of who would be affected, whether there could be a racially discriminatory impact, how it would change policing and whether it worked were not raised in any serious way.
• Only now, after activists have protested, after scholars have critiqued and after the original predictive policing companies have shut down or been bought by bigger companies, is the DOJ starting to ask the hard questions.

Lessons not learned?

• As one example, real-time crime centers are being built across America.
• Thousands of security cameras stream to a single command center that is linked to automated license plate readers, gunshot detection sensors and 911 calls.

• Real-time crime centers can do predictive analytics akin to predictive policing simply as a byproduct of all the data they collect in the ordinary course of a day.
• The centers can also scan entire cities with powerful computer vision-enabled cameras and react in real time.
• The capabilities of these advanced technologies make the civil liberties and racial justice fears around predictive policing pale in comparison.

I have worked as an unpaid consultant on two NIJ grants. I did not receive any compensation. One grant was an early NIJ grant to the Risk Terrain Modeling folks at Rutgers (which became Simsi). I have not had any relationship with them in years and took no money. I was also on an NIJ grant around the ethics of predictive policing. Again, I did not receive any financial compensation for the role.