by CivicMeter Staff | Apr 25, 2019 | Criminal Justice
Poor quality data and even poorer state-wide reporting standards have opened up gaps in California’s records that have allowed violent felons to have access to guns while unduly penalizing others for misdemeanors. “The absence of good data is a threat to public...
by CivicMeter Staff | Apr 25, 2019 | Criminal Justice
New York City wanted to be sure that the AI and the algorithms that will be used to manage its programs would be unbiased. But the task force NYC formed to carry out this directive isn’t sure it can achieve its objective. Task force members say that the lack of...
by CivicMeter Staff | Apr 25, 2019 | Criminal Justice
A town councilman and local business leader claims that the tourist town of Niagara Falls, New York is under siege from criminals. Yet the town’s police chief claims that such reports are exaggerated and cites data that the incidence of crime has been falling for the...
by CivicMeter Staff | Apr 25, 2019 | Criminal Justice
Everything that happens in the world happens in a specific location. The ability to situate and analyze that piece of information in combination with a million other bits of data from satellites or drones or ground-based devices provides vantage points that clears...
by CivicMeter Staff | Apr 25, 2019 | Criminal Justice
Doctors operating out of ‘Pill Mills’ has been a prime reason for the opioid epidemic in the US. Yet the days of freely-prescribed pain medication may be over soon. Teams of data analysts from the Justice Department are firing up their computers and are crunching data...
by CivicMeter Staff | Apr 24, 2019 | Criminal Justice
The Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA) has decided to discontinue its semi-annual report on violent crime in big American and Canadian cities because it feared that its data was being misused. Researchers have deplored the decision and contended that timely data...
by CivicMeter Staff | Apr 24, 2019 | Criminal Justice
Florida spends nearly $2.4 billion a year to keep more than 100,000 people behind bars. The state runs not only one of the largest and most expensive prison systems in the US, but also among the most racially disparate. Nearly half of the incarcerated are...
by CivicMeter Staff | Apr 24, 2019 | Criminal Justice
The effort to bring about effected criminal justice reforms in the US is being hindered by the lack of data about the justice system at the county level. There are more people locked away in local jails and state prisons than in federal prisons. And for the more than...
by CivicMeter Staff | Apr 24, 2019 | Criminal Justice
A study conducted by researchers from New York University revealed that existing biased and corrupt policing could also infect predictive policing software by introducing “dirty data” into the algorithm. This situation can be further exacerbated by the lack of...
by CivicMeter Staff | Apr 24, 2019 | Criminal Justice
The FBI is asking Congress to add $70.5 million to its budget so it can hire more data analysts and expand its cybersecurity capacity in the face of growing threats from hackers supported by rogue nation-states. Derek B. Johnson reports on the FBI’s plan to beef up...
