Criminal Law

Risk assessment tools

Facial recognition

Gunshot detection

Criminal Law: Risk Assessment Tools

• Use ML at arraignments to “help” determine bail and sometimes sentence

• Designed to take in details of a defendant’s profile & produce recidivism score—a single number estimating the likelihood that defendant will reoffend.

Criminal Law: Risk Assessment Tools

ML algorithms use statistics to find patterns in data.

If you feed it historical crime data, it will pick out the patterns associated with crime.

Statistical correlations, NOT causations

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If an algorithm found that low income was correlated with high recidivism, it wouldn’t give you actual info about whether low income actually caused crime.

Can turn correlative insights into causal scoring mechanisms.