Laurel Eckhouse (2017). Big data may be reinforcing racial bias in the criminal justice system. Washington Post. 10 February 2017. © 2017 Washington Post.
Laurel Eckhouse (2017). Big data may be reinforcing racial bias in the criminal justice system. Washington Post. 10 February 2017. © 2017 Washington Post.
From the article: “As we seek to advance the responsible use of data for racial injustice, we encourage individuals and organizations to support and build upon efforts already underway.” HRDAG is listed in the Data Driven Activism and Advocacy category.
HRDAG associate William Isaac is quoted in this article about how predictive policing algorithms such as PredPol exacerbate the problem of racial bias in policing.
Boston Police deployed SWAT teams disproportionately to Black neighborhoods, sometimes raiding homes with young children. HRDAG extracted data revealing just how disproportionate.
The report tries to answer the question of whether a particular risk assessment model reinforces racial inequalities in the criminal justice system.
Kilómetro Cero is making a comparison of police killings in Puerto Rico and police killings in the non-territorial United States, and HRDAG is helping to organize the data.
Algorithmic tools like PredPol were supposed to reduce bias. But HRDAG has found that racial bias is baked into the data used to train the tools.
If you'd like to support HRDAG in this project, please consider making a donation via Our Donate page.
Over the last year, HRDAG has deepened the national conversation about homicides by police, predictive policing software, and the role that bail plays in the criminal justice system. Our studies describe how the racial bias inherent in police practice becomes data input to predictive policing tools. In another project, we are shining light on the iniquities of bail decisions.
TEAM
Click each team member's photo for full bio. Here's the team on Twitter.
Examining the Impact of Bail
When a defendant is detained before trial, she will face ...
Tools like Compas allegedly help judges predict future criminal activities and eliminate bias. HRDAG and partners showed how the tools recycle bias.
Note from the author (June 2020)
The largest public demonstrations in a generation are at this moment demanding reform or abolition of the police in the United States.[1] The overwhelming and destabilizing violence by police against protesters has been egregiously disproportionate to the threats to property posed by a tiny minority of the demonstrators. Thanks to cell phone video and media coverage, Americans seem to be noticing, and there may be sufficient political momentum for meaningful change.
It is essential in this moment to remember how authorities will respond to this pressure. Always, those authorities will claim that their extraordinary ...
The files linked on this page contain the data used in the calculations presented in Benetech's report to the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission entitled "Descriptive Statistics From Statements to the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission." In accordance with Benetech's Memorandum of Understanding with the TRC, these data are published on the Internet so that others can use the material to replicate our findings and continue research on past human rights violations in Liberia. In order to protect the privacy of the people who suffered, the information in the files below contains no personal identifying information about the victims or ...
2025
14 November, 2025 - Analyzing Chicago's missing person cases
21 October, 2025 - HRDAG takes a stand against tyranny
9 October, 2025 - Unlocking unstructured data and getting it right
30 September, 2025 - Structural Zero 04: Pulling Back the Curtain on LLMs and Policing Data
23 September, 2025 - California’s Racial Justice Act and Police Records Access Project
24 August, 2025 - Structural Zero 03: Without Encryption, My Work Wouldn’t Be Possible
17 July, 2025 - Structural Zero 02: Scatter and keep working
3 June, 2025 - Structural Zero 01: Dictatorships create a lot of data
24 June, 2025 - Breaking through the ...
When people talk about war criminals in Guatemala, which war are they talking about?
They’re talking about the Guatemalan civil war, which began in 1960 and ended in 1996. That’s thirty-six years of civil war. Even though it ended almost two decades ago, Guatemala is still recovering from it. At its simplest, this civil war story was right-wing government forces fighting leftist rebels. But it went deeper than that, of course. The majority of the rebel forces was composed of indigenous peoples, primarily the Maya, (more…)
Wilkerson was speaking at the inaugural Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, a gathering of academics and policymakers working to make the algorithms that govern growing swaths of our lives more just. The woman who’d invited him there was Kristian Lum, the 34-year-old lead statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, a San Francisco-based non-profit that has spent more than two decades applying advanced statistical models to expose human rights violations around the world. For the past three years, Lum has deployed those methods to tackle an issue closer to home: the growing use of machine learning tools in America’s criminal justice system.
From my first introduction to the HRDAG community at the annual retreat it was clear to me that mentorship is an organizational priority and that the contributions of interns are valued. Much of my first couple weeks as a summer intern at HRDAG were spent familiarizing myself with Patrick’s paradigm for principled data processing. At the same time, I was learning the skills and tricks (bash, make, vim, git) that promote an effortless programming workflow, a pursuit that Patrick calls “sharpening the saw” (just like in programming, you can cut down a tree with a dull blade, but your life will be much easier if you take the time to sharpen ...
Will you help HRDAG advance human rights?
[English]
Hissène Habré fût le Président de l’ancienne colonie française du Tchad de 1982 à 1990. De nombreuses allégations crédibles de torture systématique et de crimes contre l’humanité ont été faites contre la Direction de Documentation et de Sécurité (DDS), les forces de l’ordre responsables pour la persécution d’adversaires du régime Habré qui étaient aussi responsables pour l’administration de nombreuses prisons durant ce régime.
“La Piscine” est une ancienne piscine qui a été couverte par un toit en béton. Il est allégué qu’il s’agissait là d’une des prisons de la DDS dans laquelle de nombreux ...
