Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson announces the city is terminating its contract with ShotSpotter, the controversial gunshot detection technology company, bringing to an end one of the largest and longest-running deployments of acoustic surveillance in American policing. The contract will expire on …
The reliability and accuracy of ShotSpotter’s gunshot detection technology face a major crisis in August 2021 as the Chicago Office of Inspector General releases a damning report on the system’s effectiveness, while the Michael Williams case exposes evidence that ShotSpotter analysts …
On May 18, 2021, Amazon extended its global ban on police use of Rekognition facial recognition software indefinitely “until further notice,” prolonging what was originally announced as a one-year moratorium in June 2020. The extension came just weeks before the original moratorium was …
PredPol, the controversial predictive policing software company, rebrands itself as Geolitica in 2021 as criticism of algorithmic bias in law enforcement intensifies. The rebrand represents an attempt to distance the company from growing scrutiny of predictive policing’s discriminatory impacts …
On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, Amazon announced a one-year moratorium on police use of its Rekognition facial recognition software, shocking civil rights activists and researchers who had spent two years fighting to stop the company from selling surveillance technology to law enforcement. The …
Multiple academic studies and internal police audits published in 2019 provide comprehensive evidence of PredPol’s racial bias and failure to demonstrate effectiveness, undermining the fundamental claims that have justified the technology’s widespread adoption.
An internal audit by the …
ShotSpotter’s acoustic gunshot detection system undergoes major expansion across the United States during 2015, with significant deployments in New York City and Sacramento representing the technology’s growing adoption by major metropolitan police departments.
In August 2015, the New …
PredPol’s predictive policing software reaches widespread adoption across the United States, with almost 60 police departments using the technology by early 2015. Major cities including Los Angeles, Atlanta, and numerous smaller jurisdictions have implemented the algorithmic crime prediction …
The Chicago Police Department launches the Strategic Subject List (SSL), colloquially known as the “heat list,” a predictive policing mechanism designed to identify individuals most likely to be involved in gun violence either as perpetrators or victims. The program’s public debut …
The New Orleans Police Department launches a secretive predictive policing program in partnership with Palantir Technologies, a data-mining firm founded with seed money from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel. The program operates without public knowledge or oversight, escaping scrutiny …
PredPol, a predictive policing software company, is founded in Santa Cruz, California by UCLA Professor of Anthropology Jeff Brantingham and mathematician George Mohler. The company emerges from research begun in 2010 when Brantingham recruited UCLA mathematicians to develop algorithms for …
The Los Angeles Police Department launches Operation LASER (Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration), a controversial predictive policing program that runs from 2011 to 2019. The program is designed to identify and target individuals deemed at high risk of committing violent crimes using a …