Like many of my fellow
liberals, I get a lot of my news from the most reliable
sources: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and, of
course, The Daily Show.
Last week, The Daily Show did a superb analysis of
“stop-and-frisk” – the policing tactic pioneered in New York City under former
Mayor Rudy Giuliani and struck down by a judge who branded it “indirect racial profiling.”
In the
clip below, Trevor Noah goes through the problems with stop-and-frisk one after
the other:
§ The
rate of false positives – innocent people stopped and frisked – is staggering.
§ Though
the name suggests a gentle, benign process, the reality is a deeply
frightening, humiliating experience to those who must undergo it.
§ It is
racially biased.
§ Defenders
say it’s not biased, it’s based on applying a series of risk factors said to be
associated with criminal behavior.
§ It
backfires by sowing so much fear and distrust in poor communities of color that
it undermines law enforcement and compromises safety.
But backers of
stop-and-frisk – overwhelmingly white and middle class – say they know
better than people who actually live in communities of color. Former House
Speaker Newt Gingrich put it this way:
You run into liberals who would
rather see people killed than have the kind of aggressive policing … And a lot
of the people whose lives were saved because of policing in neighborhoods that
needed it the most, were minority Americans.
But
what else would you expect from right-wing Republicans like Gingrich, or
Giuliani or Donald Trump himself? Liberals would never tolerate such a harmful,
racially biased intrusion on civil liberties.
Or
would they?
As you watch the clip,
try this: Whenever Trevor Noah says “crime” or “criminal” substitute “child
abuse” or “child abuser.” And whenever he says stop-and-frisk, substitute
child welfare’s version of stop-and-frisk, that much-hyped approach in which in
which a computer uses demographic and other information to tell caseworkers
which parents supposedly are a danger to their children: predictive analytics.
As with stop-and-frisk,
predictive analytics puts a pseudo-scientific veneer on indirect racial profiling.
ProPublica proved it. And
as with stop-and-frisk, predictive analytics leads to an enormous number of false
positives, guaranteeing that many more innocent families will be swept into the
system, and their children needlessly consigned to foster care, with all
of the harm that often follows.
Indeed,
if anything the collateral damage of predictive analytics can be worse than
stop-and-frisk. With stop-and-frisk, a child may see his father thrown up
against a wall and roughed up, but at least when it’s over the child still will
have his father.
Yes, there are some in
the research community and elsewhere who are making a good-faith effort to
wring the racial bias out of predictive analytics algorithms, or otherwise curb
their misuse. But that will last only until the first news story about the
death of a child “known to the system” that supposedly could have been
prevented if only the child welfare agency had used all the data it had – essentially the Gingrich
argument.
Unfortunately, once again
too many on the left are willing to abandon everything they claim to believe in as soon as someone whispers the
words “child abuse” in their ears. That never turns out well for children.
