NEWS
19 June 2020

Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

More than 1,400 researchers have signed a letter calling on the discipline to stop working on predictive-policing algorithms and other models.

Davide Castelvecchi

Davide Castelvecchi

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The tide of reckoning on systemic racism and police brutality that has been sweeping through institutions — including scientific ones — has reached universities’ normally reclusive mathematics departments. A group of mathematicians in the United States has written a letter calling for their colleagues to stop collaborating with police because of the widely documented disparities in how US law-enforcement agencies treat people of different races and ethnicities. They concentrate their criticism on predictive policing, a maths-based technique aimed at stopping crime before it occurs.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01874-9

References

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