The United States Department of Justice has failed to convince a group of US lawmakers that state and local police agencies aren’t awarded federal grants to buy AI-based “policing” tools known to be inaccurate, if not prone to exacerbating biases long observed in US police forces. Seven members of Congress wrote in a letter to … Read more
Apple released iOS 17.2 in December, and the update added new features, including the long-awaited Journal app, to iPhones. The update also gave you more control over some of your iPhone’s features. For example, iOS 17.2 lets you disable inline predictive text from showing up in Messages. When Apple launched iOS 17 in September, one of … Read more
My favorite thing about a fancy gadget I recently tested involved being nine feet from it and sipping a cold one. I wasn’t doing nothing, just close to nothing: talking to my brother-in-law Ben while occasionally glancing at a countdown timer on a display next to the grill. That timer is a feature on a … Read more
Image: zef art (Shutterstock) Predictive policing—the trendy law enforcement field that uses data collection and analysis to try to predict where crimes will occur—has been wildly popular with police departments across the country. Unfortunately, though some cops swear by it, there hasn’t always been a ton of evidence that the tech actually works that well. … Read more
In her 2019 master’s thesis for the Naval Postgraduate School, Ana Lalley, police chief of Elgin, Illinois, wrote critically about her department’s experience with the software, which left officers unimpressed. “Officers routinely question the prediction method,” she wrote. “Many believe that the awareness of crime trends and patterns they have gained through training and experience … Read more