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.
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.
In the second blog in our new series exploring the use of biometrics, we take a look at iris recognition, a technology being deployed nationwide – from the Southern border to Massachusetts –but one that has yet to see the news coverage and public discussion that have surrounded other high-profile biometric technologies.
How should private companies, governments, and the public address concerns posed by new technologies, such as the loss of privacy, perpetuation of racial injustice, or the prospect of widespread government surveillance? Microsoft President Brad Smith recently visited NYU Law for a discussion of these issues and the new book “Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age.”
Technology has drastically shaped our society and our lives, with equal potential for both incredible good and devastating harm. Join us for a conversation with Brad Smith, President of Microsoft, to discuss his newly released book, Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age, in the context of policing technology, with special emphasis on the ethics of AI, privacy legislation and the need for regulation on facial recognition.
The Policing Project’s new blog series explores one of the more complex—and rapidly changing—areas of policing: the use of biometric technologies. For our first blog in this series, we explore face recognition, covering some common questions like, “How are police using this technology?” and “How does the technology work?”
How do we know what works in policing and what doesn’t? Often, the answer is, “We don’t.” As Policing Project Faculty Director Barry Friedman and extern Kate Mather explain in a new editorial for Just Security, evidence-based policing is still a niche approach struggling to find its place in mainstream law enforcement.
