everybody my name is Yeshi Milner and I am founder an executive director of Data
For Black Lives we are an organization of scientists activists students parents
teachers black communities all working to harness the power of big data to make
concrete and measurable change in the lives of black people we know that for a
really really long time data has been weaponized against black communities
through FICO credit scores redlining even the three-fifths compromise racism
in this country has almost always been numerical and today we things are no
different these technology companies have a lot more data which give them a
lot more power and a lot more influence around political decisions that really
really really impact communities of color especially black communities today
I wanted to come on and talk about what recently happened with Amazon and I want
to preface this by saying that this is not the first time that a big tech
company has been involved with providing data or directly providing services to
law enforcement for the purposes of specifically tracking surveilling
surveillance and identifying quote-unquote future crimes and future
criminals in 2016 the Baltimore Police Department in collaboration with
geofeedia which is a location-based tracking and threat detection software
company that has raised millions of dollars in venture capital funding of
course you know it was exposed by the ACLU that they had been using Facebook
Instagram and Twitter data in order to identify people involved with the
protests that had become a response to the miscarriage of justice that was
Freddie Gray's murder at the hands of Baltimore Police geofeedia used location
data tweet data problems and facial recognition image data in order to find
out that there was chatter amongst high school students
around a protest of course the police responded as they probably would have
done without the data which is by rounding up and arresting hundreds of
young people high school students on their way home from school
I remember when the protests were happening and activists from all over
the country were making call to other organizations like the one that I was
working with to help them fundraise to get some of these young people out of
jail when you asked the Baltimore Police Department around how they use the data
being said that they were able to also find rocks and sticks and protest signs
and other kind of paraphernalia that had been allegedly used by these young
people in order to link them to these protests we know that this was really
not the case we know that this was another example of the ways in which
Baltimore police department was using these technologies in order to do what
they've always done exactly what they did to Freddie gray and to continue to
suppress the voices of young black people and of black communities in the
city at the same time we do commend Facebook Instagram and Twitter for
heeding the call and for responding to ACL u--'s pushback on these issues by
rescinding all the data that had been provided to geofeedia and this was
before all the Cambridge analytical scandal this was before any of us even
knew that it was possible for private companies to take our data created on
these social media platforms whether it's through scraping data whether it's
through having developer access whether it's or just plain stealing it in order
to develop products and technologies that could make money in this case the
law enforcement technologies why is this a problem first of all the Act and the
history of surveilling policing and incarcerated black communities is
historical we know you know I grew up under the Clinton crime bill which was a
legislation that was really embedded in legislation opinions really racist and
on evidence and totally totally unfounded besides on own
personal bias perceptions of young black people this is where we see the super
predator myth being proliferated this is where we see ideas like the fact that in
a few years young black youth all over the country are going to literally take
over the country a violent crime robbing white communities snatching old
ladies bags we haven't seen that happen in fact after they after the super
predator myth came out we saw a decline in youth crime and john de luleå the
social scientist who was leading the charge against us this entire time ended
up retracting his statement and becoming a Catholic as a way to atone for what I
think is a very egregious sin of lying to the public around the realities of
young people especially young black people even though the super predator
myth has been totally dismissed and has been totally unfounded we see these
myths not only embedded in code Cathy O'Neil always says that opinions
algorithms our opinions embedded in code we see them embedded in legislation we
could have event in the culture and the practices of policing when it comes to
what's happening with Amazon right now I think it's particularly interesting that
the to put law enforcement agencies that are involved in this Orlando and Oregon
are also hopefully going to be called under question for my work as an
activist in Florida around ending to school to Prison Pipeline and Ron police
brutality from my work around pushing for Trayvon's law or response to the
miscarriage of justice that was George Zimmerman's acquittal I spent a lot of
time learning about law enforcement in the state of Florida and I remember you
know one day when we got a call from a news station and from some act of some
other comedian forgets where a female police officer actually got went into a
shooting range and after going into the shooting range she saw that the police
and it were in there before her had been using mug shots of real people real mug
shots of black menace target practice one of the people in
those mug shots were her own brother so literally when we were saying that law
enforcement was using black people as target practice
this was actually happening literally law enforcement Florida have been using
black people as target practice whether it's in shooting ranges and that
culture and that same attitude spilling out in the streets when they should be
doing their job as public servants when we think about big base the database is
behind the facial recognition software a lot of the data that used to identify
images against one another which is the whole technology behind facial
recognition software are based on mug shot databases we don't have a crime
data in this country we have arrest data there are plenty of white people who are
committing crimes they're never arrested for it they're not so what do we see in
these mug shots databases we see an over-representation and an over sampling
of black individuals we see an over-representation of black people who
again have not been trying have not been convicted of crimes they've only been
arrested in most states in this country the likelihood and the ratio of black
people being arrested to white people are three to one that means that black
people are three times more likely to be arrested than white people this makes me
say that above all this facial recognition software is none other than
automated racial profiling setting us back decades if not generations in
efforts to end the over policing the over surveillance and the
criminalization of black communities these technologies will not just be used
at protest student walkouts anti-trump demonstrations but will also probably be
used at polling places they'll be you in schools they'll be using social
services agencies instead of using this technology for example to help identify
the many girls black girls mind you who've gone missing in DC to help us
track down the many many young people who are being sex trafficked across this
country every day instead of it being used to provide even more security to
make sure that Muslim communities other religious groups are not being
victimized to help us document hate crimes there's very little data on hate
crimes that are happening but know none of this technology is going to be used
for that instead it's going to be used to continue a historical and vicious
cycle of repression and of criminalization that I think we honestly
have an opportunity to end right now the data for black labs is proud to be in
support of ACL u--'s letter as well as our own efforts to hold Facebook
accountable by pushing Facebook to commit data to a public data trust
establish a code of ethics and to hire more black data scientists so that
internally within these organizations when something like this happens there
are people there who can pushback and who can say this is not OK we are not
going to use our talents as data scientists as researchers as people who
really do believe in that the technology behind facial recognition to do good
we're not going to let it be used for harm thank you very much please follow
our YouTube channel follow us on instagram at data' for black lives
number 4 as well as twitter data for black labs thank you have a good day
you
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