Now, a well-tuned algorithm should be built so that it can take account of the tactics being used by the police. There are ways, theoretically at least, to ensure that the algorithm doesn’t disproportionately target particular neighbourhoods – like randomly sending police to medium-risk areas as well as high-risk ones. But, unfortunately, there’s no way to know for sure whether PredPol is managing to avoid these feedback loops entirely, or indeed whether it is operating fairly more generally, because PredPol is a proprietary algorithm, so the code isn’t available to the public and no one knows
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Propietary software
