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As efforts to stop police brutality and defund the police continue, Ford Motor Company employees are taking direct action. According to The Verge , a group of Ford employees has asked the automaker to stop making the Ford Police Interceptor and other pursuit-rated utility vehicles , which are built specifically for law enforcement. Also, new technologies are tested in Ford’s cop cars that benefit their overall lineup. “We cannot claim to support the fight against systemic racism while supplying and supporting the very systems that perpetrate violence against Black Americans,” the group wrote, according to Jalopnik. “Throughout our history, the vehicles that Ford employees design and build have been used as accessories to police brutality and oppression.” In response to the employee’s concerns, Ford CEO Jim Hackett has told employees that they will continue their commitment to law enforcement as he doesn’t think it’s “controversial that the Ford Police Interceptor helps officers do...
As awareness around facial recognition continues to grow, a primary concern has been its potential to open up new frameworks for mass surveillance. That concern grew even more pressing as people realized that facial recognition could potentially be used in body cameras, essentially creating roving, real-time surveillance systems on the chests of police. On Thursday, Axon — the company that created the Taser and supplies 47 out of the 69 largest police agencies in the United States with body cameras and software — announced a ban on the use of facial recognition on its devices . Although this can certainly be considered a temporary victory, Axon’s announcement must be carefully analyzed — both within social contexts, the words that the company used, and its own history. Axon’s decision comes from the first report of an AI and Policing Technology Ethics Board that the company originally formed in April of 2018. The board was developed to lead Axon in ethically developing products and...
On Wednesday, San Francisco announced District Attorney George Gascón’s plans to implement a new artificial intelligence tool to stop bias when charging people with crimes. According to the San Francisco Examiner, the tool will be implemented on July 1. The bias mitigation tool works by removing identifying information from police reports. Anything that could hint at a person’s race will be taken out, including descriptions of eye and hair color. However, it’s not just physical descriptors that could imply somebody’s race. The program will remove peoples’ names, locations, and neighborhoods from reports too. A spokesperson for the DA also told the Verge that details about police officers will be taken out. The bias mitigation tool was developed by Alex Chohlas-Wood and a team at the Stanford Computational Policy Lab. The Verge noted that the same developer also came up with the New York Police Department’s Patternizr System. AI is generally known for introducing or reinforcing...