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Pulling Back the Curtain on LLMs & Policing Data
Structural Zero Issue 04
September 30, 2025
Artificial intelligence is transforming how we work with information. At HRDAG, that changes how I do my job every day. My most recent project was using LLMs to explore and parse vast quantities of data about police abuses in California.
In this newsletter, I’ll pull back the curtain on that work. I’ll describe how a diverse coalition gathered more than a million pages of documents about police misconduct in California and how LLMs helped us make sense of them in ways that wouldn’t have been possible before the advent of this technology.
In addition to understanding my work, I hope that this ...
Liberia
In July 2009, The Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) concluded a three-year project with the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help clarify Liberia's violent history and hold perpetrators of human rights abuses accountable for their actions. (This work was conducted by HRDAG while with Benetech.)
In the course of this work, HRDAG analyzed more than 17,000 victim and witness statements collected by the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission and compiled the data into a report entitled "Descriptive Statistics From Statements to the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission." The report is included as an annex to the final ...
How we make sure that nobody is counted twice: A peek into HRDAG's record de-duplication
HRDAG is currently evaluating the quality and completeness of the Kosovo Memory Book of the Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) in Belgrade, Serbia. The objective of the Kosovo Memory Book (KMB) is to commemorate every single person who fell victim to armed conflict in Kosovo from 1998 to 2000, either through death or disappearance.
While building and reviewing their database, one of the things that HLC has to do is “record linkage,” a process also known as “matching.” Matching determines whether two records are the same people (“a match”) or different people (“a non-match”). Matching helps to identify whether two existing records refer ...
Connect with HRDAG
If you’d like to stay informed about HRDAG events, blogposts, and news, connect with us on Twitter, Facebook or through our RSS feed. We also have a LinkedIn page.
You may contact us directly via email at info @ hrdag.org.
A note for persons in search of assistance with specific human rights cases: We are very sorry for your troubles and your suffering; however, HRDAG does not take on casework. If you need help with a human rights case, you might consider requesting it from the International Committee of the Red Cross (www.icrc.org).
Photo: U.S. National Archives
How we go about estimating casualties in Syria—Part 1
I spent the two weeks over Easter working with Patrick and Megan in San Francisco, trying to figure out a strategy of how best to estimate the number of casualties the Syrian civil war has claimed in the past two years. In January, HRDAG published a report on the number of fully identified casualties reported in the Syrian Arab Republic between March 2011 and November 2012. The number of de-duplicated records of killings for this period was 59,648, a number that is likely to be an undercount since we know that many incidences of lethal violence in conflict go unreported, and that the unreported cases are not missing at random. (more…)
BJS Report on Arrest-Related Deaths: True Number Likely Much Greater
(This post is co-authored by Patrick Ball and Kristian Lum.)
Today the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released a report on their effort to document “all deaths that occur during the process of arrest in the United States.” The analysis estimates that the Arrest-Related Deaths (ARD) program covers only 34-49% of these deaths. A parallel program by the FBI (the Supplementary Homicide Reports, SHR) is estimated to cover approximately the same proportion of deaths. Even taking into consideration both programs, 28% of all police homicides remain unreported.
In order to estimate the total number of homicides that appear on neither the ARD or ...
Rise of the racist robots – how AI is learning all our worst impulses
“If you’re not careful, you risk automating the exact same biases these programs are supposed to eliminate,” says Kristian Lum, the lead statistician at the San Francisco-based, non-profit Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG). Last year, Lum and a co-author showed that PredPol, a program for police departments that predicts hotspots where future crime might occur, could potentially get stuck in a feedback loop of over-policing majority black and brown neighbourhoods. The program was “learning” from previous crime reports. For Samuel Sinyangwe, a justice activist and policy researcher, this kind of approach is “especially nefarious” because police can say: “We’re not being biased, we’re just doing what the math tells us.” And the public perception might be that the algorithms are impartial.
Primer to Inform Discussions about Bail Reform
The primer addresses what pretrial risk assessment is and what the research supports.
RustConf 2019, and systems programming as a data scientist
It could make sense to use Rust as a data journalist for in-browser computations, and other thoughts from RustConf.
.Rproj Considered Harmful
We aim to produce code that is clear, replicatable across machines and operating systems, and that leaves an easy-to-follow audit trail.
Learning a Modular, Auditable and Reproducible Workflow
The modular nature of the workflow and use of Git allowed us to work on different parts of the project from across the country.
Identifiers of Detained Children Have Implications for Data Security and Estimation
Identifiers being sequential could make possible estimations of the population of detained children.
Can the Armed Conflict Become Part of Colombia’s History?
Paula Amado and María Juliana Durán Fedullo reflect on how the Truth Commission may change Colombia’s history, finally officially acknowledging the 50-year conflict and its casualties, and reckoning with who did what to whom.
How Data Analysis Confirmed the Bias in a Family Screening Tool
In Pittsburgh …
How Predictive Policing Reinforces Bias
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.
How Pretrial Risk Assessment Tools Perpetuate Unfairness
Tools like Compas allegedly help judges predict future criminal activities and eliminate bias. HRDAG and partners showed how the tools recycle bias.
New Research Shows Community Engagement Improves the Validity and Reliability of Artificial Intelligence
AI is transforming the way scientists analyze complex data.
Human Rights Violations: How Do We Begin Counting the Dead?
At the 2014 Joint Statistical Meetings, Patrick Ball discussed his invited paper, "Human Rights Violations: How Do We Begin Counting the Dead?" Also at the JSM, he was honored as a new Fellow of the American Statistical Association and inducted by ASA President Nathaniel Schenker.
Joint Statistical Meetings
August 7, 2014
Boston, Massachusetts
Link to JSM 2014 online program
Back to Talks
Syria: No word on four abducted activists
Razan Zatouneh is an esteemed colleague of ours, and we are one of 57 organizations demanding immediate release for her and the three other human rights defenders still missing.
A year on, no information on Douma Four
The prominent Syrian human rights defenders Razan Zaitouneh, Samira Khalil, Wa’el Hamada and Nazem Hamadi – the Douma Four—remain missing a year after their abduction, 57 organizations said today. The four were abducted in Duma, a city near Damascus under the control of armed opposition groups. They should be released immediately, the groups said.
On 9 December 2013, at about 10:40 pm, a group of armed men stormed into the ...
Celebrating Ten Years of Data from the AHPN
Ten years ago, in July 2005, human rights officers stumbled upon a nondescript warehouse in a commercial zone of Guatemala City and changed history. They had discovered an archive–its existence kept secret–belonging to the Guatemalan National Police, whose officers committed human rights atrocities on behalf of the government during the civil war.
Inside the building was the bureaucratic detritus typical of a large government agency: 80 million pages detailing shifts worked, tasks assigned, assignments fulfilled, workers’ whereabouts, and who was supervising whom. The documents, which were found stacked on dirty floors, shoved into bags, ...