Controversies in the Data Society 2020
Our ability to control our “data double” is on decline. The reliance on
statistics in policymaking only reinforces what Braman labels “the
dissolution of the individual into a probability”. “Big data” and
predictive analytics, whether used for welfare provision, targeted
healthcare or policing, raise important questions about bias and
fairness in these algorithmic systems and about how activists might
respond to increasingly quantitative and data-driven policy and city
planning. In this talk, I discuss the activities of the Stop LAPD Spying
Coalition, a grassroots group in Los Angeles that organizes against the
LAPD’s predictive policing programs. The group’s activist investigative
report, Before the Bullet Hits the Body, offers a tactics for building
political resistance against algorithmic representations, and it exposes
the politics behind the data’s production and interpretation.