Not the first article about this kind of stuff. Police departments can do whatever they want to obtain leads (as long as it is legal (Gray area)). I will be worried when they will start using technology instead of judges.
That seems like a shortsighted position because it ignores the cost of selective enforcement. Everyone breaks laws on a daily basis - jaywalking, speeding, etc. - and you could have a severely disproportionate cost by enforcing that more for one group than another, even with every trial being completely fair.
Here in DC there was an example awhile back prior to legalizing marijuana: white people apparently used at a higher rate but most of the prosecutions were of black people both due to heavier police presence and because demographics meant that white users tended to have more privacy (limited visibility from the street, more distance between houses/sidewalks to make smell harder to notice, etc.) which made it harder to get evidence clearly showing that a specific person had been the one using. The process could be fair without changing the fact that the results disproportionately impacted one group.
That's not "selective enforcement". Race is not being selected for. People committing crimes in public is being selected for. Or people committing crimes in high-crime areas.
Some races happen to correlate with some selected traits more than others, but race is not the trait selected for.
It's completely predictable that not all traits of interest for law enforcement will be distributed equally across all racial groups. To treat this fact as a sign of systemic racism is to guarantee that you will consider every society on Earth systemically rac/sex/[group] ist.
Selective enforcement isn’t specific to racism — if you have a law which primarily impacts teenagers while other people break it with far lower penalty rates, that’s selective enforcement even if everyone is the same race.
This does commonly fall upon racial lines in countries like the United States with a long history of racial discrimination but it’s not exclusive and it’s important for anyone building systems to consider pitfalls like this because we know the users are likely to assume that a computer is unbiased.
Disproportionate impact is not the same thing as "selective enforcement". Selective enforcement means consciously choosing to enforce a law more commonly when a particular racial group breaks it. It does not members of a particular racial group disproportionately having the law enforced against them because they disproportionately exhibit a particular non-racial trait that is correlated with higher enforcement.
I've been saying this for a long time: selective enforcement of laws is not okay. We need to design laws that are not enforced selectively, but consistently. If it means that jaywalking shouldn't be against the law then so be it.
Here in DC there was an example awhile back prior to legalizing marijuana: white people apparently used at a higher rate but most of the prosecutions were of black people both due to heavier police presence and because demographics meant that white users tended to have more privacy (limited visibility from the street, more distance between houses/sidewalks to make smell harder to notice, etc.) which made it harder to get evidence clearly showing that a specific person had been the one using. The process could be fair without changing the fact that the results disproportionately impacted one group.