call-for-code / embrace-judicial-reform Goto Github PK

Theme:

Policy and legislation reform

Brief description of your idea:

Investing in communities (alternative to stock investments). Set up a blockchain network that communities can join where people can invest in neighborhoods. This is akin to the notion of sharing energy through a blockchain network. Those outside of the communities can send investment dollars. Perhaps through the purchasing of bonds. Monies would go to building up the neighborhoods - so there we would be the send of a neighborhood board that allocates funds to specific initiatives.

What makes your idea unique?:
Financial investing is usually associated with Wall Street and stocks - but what about taking that same money and investing in communities.

What would be the impact of your idea if implemented?:
Take this to local government agencies and gain adoption. Start in those financially strained communities. For instance how we could be build new water systems for communities like Flint, Michigan taking monies from a community fund that people are investing in. We could ultimately take this global.

Skills to contribute (e.g. development, architecture, research, design or anything else):
Would need someone with a financial background on the business side. Technical infrastructure: Blockchain, development, architecture

Theme:
Problem statement 2 (transparent data about officers)

Brief description of your idea:
The bystander effect describes a behavior pattern where people tend to be indifferent to emergencies when surrounded by like people who are also indifferent. If the test subject perceives themself to be similar to (in other words akin to) other bystanders who are not helping, there is a tendency of the subject to not help either. This can be tested in a controlled environment by presenting an unknowing subject with a fake emergency and a set of like and unlike other bystanders who are or are not helping. If the subject feels a connection to the peer bystanders who are helping the subject tends to help. If peer bystanders are not helping the subject tends to not help. Using racially mixed sets of actors in the test may be able to differentiate candidates who are biased vs not biased by detecting which actors they consider peers and which they do not consider peers.

It is unknown whether a virtual environment would be adequate or if a physical experience is necessary. If virtual environments are adequate then the idea can be implemented via technology alone. Even if a physical experience is required, technology can help organize and score the test.

What makes your idea unique?:
If the idea works, it has the potential to empirically determine bias in existing or candidate officers in a safe environment.

What would be the impact of your idea if implemented?:
Reduction in bias in the officer population. Potential for training uses.

Skills to contribute (e.g. development, architecture, research, design or anything else):
For the pure virtual approach needs 3d modeling skills.
Behavioral researchers
UI, database, combinatorial test design development

News article that prompted the idea https://www.inverse.com/science/study-finds-animals-exhibit-the-bystander-effect

Brief description of your idea:
There is a growing demand and transition toward police alternatives. What if there was a way for 911 dispatch to send callers more appropriate help, which often is not a police officer. How can we build a system leveraging machine learning (predictive technology) and NLP to help 911 dispatch get callers on the phone with more trained and specialized professionals, and or send callers trained, unarmed professionals to respond to nonviolent matters (i.e. mental health, school discipline, etc.)....

SCENARIO: Caller calls 911 and is connected to 911 dispatch. Both the 911 dispatch and the system listens to and analyzes the caller's purpose for calling. Based on the information the system gathers from the caller (key words, sense of urgency, location, etc.), the system makes a recommendation on what department/service will best handle the situation to the Dispatcher 1) Send the police 2) Send an alternative. The Dispatcher can decide to accept or reject the systems recommendation. If the system and the Dispatcher agree on the Alternative option, the system can automatically connect the caller to the appropriate department/resource and facilitate the required action steps.

What would be the impact of your idea if implemented?:
This would support the idea that police officers are not always the best option to respond to non-violent matters. It would free up police officers for more critical matters.

Theme: Beyond Police Reform

Brief description of your idea:
While there are many ideas of how to reform police, certain communities already implement alternatives to traditional police force (sometimes in addition to local police). Other communities are considering adopting these ideas as well. Some activists believe that reform simply isn't enough, especially when the police force is used as a tool to enforce white supremacy and protect private property rather than lives.

What makes your idea unique?:
It allows us to look beyond just reform of an antiquated institution and explore options that could potentially be safer and more effective than policing in certain situations. When the word "reform" is used, it is often too vague and doesn't inherently give any idea of specific change. Looking beyond reform allows our group to work without the confines of trying to "fix" a very complex and broken system.

Example: CAHOOTS is a response unit based in Eugene, Oregon "that provides 24/7 coverage to an area with about 250,000 people and responds to emergency situations that don’t require law enforcement intervention, such as those involving people who struggle with homelessness, substance abuse or mental illness."

What would be the impact of your idea if implemented?:
If this idea was implemented, we could understand the logistics and potential of a police free world. While it is a thought that many might find impossible, it is a conversation that this group can have and explore.

Studying the potential outcome and impact of abolishing police could also serve as a model to many communities. Changes/reform to police can be difficult to implement because of local laws and jurisdiction that police forces fall under in different states, cities, and counties, especially considering that there are over 15,000 law enforcement agencies across the nation.

Skills to contribute (e.g. development, architecture, research, design or anything else):

• Need to do research on more communities with these programs

• Additional data on the differences between traditional police forces vs alternatives (looking at any changes in incarcerations, violence, overall safety)

• Survey communities for their thoughts on a future without police, thoughts on current views of police in their cities

Is your technical contribution related to a problem? Please describe.

As we've seen with many high-profile cases, callers to 911 frequently use 911 to harass people of color or falsely portray them as a threat when they are not. 911 has become a tool for race-based harassment, unjustified use of stand your ground claims, and has led to many deaths. Despite this, data on 911 abuse and its impact on policing of black communities and people is hard to come by, largely because of the closed design of Public Safety Answering Points. These PSAPs are essentially 911 call centers. They are governed by technology standards that lead to closed systems. The data are very important to reducing racially abusive 911 calls that threaten people on the basis of race and that have led to many deaths. r It should be possible to open source adapters that write privacy-preserving data on 911 calls to police and their outcomes to public data repositories, for further analysis by academics, advocates, and direct stakeholders. Also provide analytic capabilities to police and review boards on statistical distribution of calls, including identifying problematic callers who pose a heightened risk of inaccurate calls that could place people in danger.

Describe the solution you'd like
Create APIs to make it easy to aggregate data from calls to Public Safety Access Points.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Open records requests - expensive, time-consuming, and hard to scale.
Sampling via surveys. Error prone and isn't able to pinpoint places where the most severe problems arise.
Additional context
I will add more information on technical design of PSAPs and the PSAP standards soon. Others, please join in!

Theme:
Applicable to all problem statements where imaging can be useful.

Brief description of your idea:
Often the information about an incident is limited because dash and body cameras have field of view and other limitations. The idea is to use one or more autonomous drones to get better coverage of an incident.

What makes your idea unique?:
Autonomous drones are immune to reporter bias and can operate in situations where other sources of information are ineffective. Multiple camera angles vastly improves the available information for decision making.

What would be the impact of your idea if implemented?:
Increased factual data to evaluate officer conduct. Extra camera angles to improve weapon / no weapon and other threat data for real time guidance to officers (problem statement 2).

Skills to contribute (e.g. development, architecture, research, design or anything else):

Hi - the wiki indicates we should open an issue to request access to the wiki. Could you provide access? I have some background research on Public Security Access Points, as well as other topics I plan to open as github issues. I'd like to share that material via the wiki.

Theme:
Problem statement 2 - transparency

Brief description of your idea:
Policies on how officer behavior problems are handled differ between jurisdictions. Citizens could be informed about how their local agency's policies compare to other jurisdictions. This would allow citizens to give informed feedback to local politicians about how policy should be changed.

What makes your idea unique?:
There isn't really any way to compare policy today without manually obtaining information and comparing it directly.

What would be the impact of your idea if implemented?:
Improved awareness of policy decisions, better transparency about how policy.

Skills to contribute (e.g. development, architecture, research, design or anything else):

Name:
Enoch Antwi & James Stewart

Theme:
Policy and Judicial Reform

Brief description of your idea:
A mobile and analytics platform available to social justice groups and the general public which enables people to capture evidence of social injustice using a mobile app. The video / other evidence is timestamped & geo-tagged in order to collate evidence into groups pertaining to a single incident. Speech to text and other video analytics can also be used in order to capture transcripts and highlight any racially motivated language and potentially compare to a legal corpus / other cases in order to understand the implications and whether the incident should be reported. Features that alert others with the app to the location of an incident and key words to trigger recording (even just sound) could also be added.

What makes your idea unique?:
To our knowledge this has not been implemented previously. Provides the opportunity to capture long term information around patterns of behaviour, this information could be analysed in order to help with reform (policing, judicial, policies etc)

What would be the impact of your idea if implemented?:
Could prevent incidents from escalating, real time capture of possible injustices and evidence forming clear visibility of racially motived incidents.

Skills to contribute (e.g. development, architecture, research, design or anything else):
Real life experience, research, design

Is your suggestion related to a problem? Please describe.
Problem statement #3 focuses on sentencing which is the last step in the adjudication process - moving earlier into preliminary hearings, indictments, plea deals and other areas may enable early/pre-trial intervention - sentencing may be too late in the process
See this link: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjFhdKguc_qAhWEhOAKHb40Dq8QFjAKegQIAhAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fpolice.unca.edu%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2FPDFs%2FTitle-IX%2FBasic_Stages_of_Criminal_Justice_-_full_page.pdf&usg=AOvVaw3phra-o-2OnF9nIfmuTe-o

What is your proposed solution?
Add focus to earlier in the process - not just on judges and sentencing but earlier phases per above

What is the impact of your solution
There is no solution but the change would enable our solutions to proactively address the earlier processes empowering our accused and their legal team to prevent a case actually getting to sentencing or ensure sentencing represents a last step in a fully transparent/fair process

See this link

Theme: Police and Judicial Reform and Accountability

Brief description of your idea: Every day, in every county across the country, judges are issuing orders finding that police officers have broken the law--that they have lied on duty or on the stand, conducted illegal searches, used excessive force, or violated someone's civil rights in other ways. These orders are referred to as "suppression orders."

Here is the problem: there is currently no organized way to track when an officer is subject to one of these orders. That means prosecutors can continue to charge cases submitted by "bad" cops and tell criminal defense attorneys that they don't know whether the officer has ever been the subject of a suppression order. It also means that officers may be able to testify in court--to a judge or a jury--without anyone knowing that they have previously broken the law while doing their jobs. In fact, it's possible that the officers themselves (and accordingly, their supervisors) don't even know whether a judge has ever found that they have broken the law. Currently, officers fired in one county or state for misconduct can be hired as an officer in another county or state, without the new agency ever being aware that a judge has found the officer lied or engaged in misconduct. (This happens all too frequently.).

There is an easy fix: a nationwide user-generated database that contains information about these suppression orders and allows users to search the database by an officer’s name, jurisdiction, or department. A database that tracks these suppression orders will help identify officers who are repeat offenders, important trends, and precincts that have troubling practices.

What makes your idea unique?:
First:

An attorney who gets a suppression order from a judge would visit the website, fill out a form with information about the officer at issue, and immediately populate a searchable database. When another attorney is preparing a case with an officer, s/he would go to the database and pull up every order issued about that officer. That information goes directly to the officer's credibility when they testifies in court to a judge or jury. It would also allow reporters and community organizers to see which officers in their communities are repeat offenders and should be terminated.

Second:

These orders are a quick and objective way to hold police officers, their departments, and prosecutors accountable. Unlike police complaints, which are private, and the internal investigations done on those complaints, which are private and typically biased, suppression orders are public. They are also objective in that they are a decision from a judge that an officer violated the law. The decision by the judge is usually the final word; not even a police sergeant or police union representative can argue with the finding or rationalize it away.

Third:

The database already exists in a simple format that can be improved dramatically with help.

With the assistance of a few tech-savvy friends, a former public defender and now civil rights attorney in Minneapolis created a website using Wix that hosts a database to track suppression orders and allows user to upload information using a form. The website is https://www.thesuppressionordersproject.org/ and was created in the past two weeks. The attorney is currently reaching out to different public defender officers and criminal defense attorneys around the country to explain its purpose and get people using it. But with only 10 entries currently, the database is already slow. To be effective, the website needs to be better and more user-friendly. Ideally, there could be a username/password requirement, better search capability, and an app or mobile version that would quickly allow users to input or search information.

What would be the impact of your idea if implemented?: The very direct impact of the idea is this: police officers who repeatedly break the law would be fired, and police officers would know they would be held accountable for their actions. As stated above, the database will also help identify important trends and precincts that boast troubling practices.

Skills to contribute (e.g. development, architecture, research, design or anything else): Even though the current version of the website exists on the Wix platform, development, architecture, and design are all skills that would be useful to improving the website and expanding its capacity. Research assistance is also required to compile contact information of the criminal defense groups in all 50 states to spread the word about the database.

Some ideas for improving the website include a document store with an Elasticsearch-driven UI and some basic tools for spam filtering, record verification marking, and user management with three roles (anonymous, user, and admin) and a submission form that's access controlled for logged in users (auth-0 social oAuth would work). Devs and product can play in the query-ui and data science space - chart reports on a map, predict likelihood a new record will be verified as accurate, user saved/share-able queries, etc. Being able to track a report from submission to verification and "appeared in x number of queries run."

Is your suggestion related to a problem? Please describe.
I would also recommend that people who are coming up with ideas read the Ferguson Commission Report, a.k.a. “Forward Through Ferguson: A Path Toward Racial Equity"
https://3680or2khmk3bzkp33juiea1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/101415_FergusonCommissionReport.pdf

What is your proposed solution?
Read the report, especially these sections:
CITIZEN-LAW ENFORCEMENT RELATIONS
Working Group Co-Chairs:
Commissioner Dan Isom
Commissioner Brittany Packnett
Desired Changes:
Design accountability measures and policies that ensure
law enforcement agencies serve and protect all citizens
based on principles of:
• Trust;
• Mutual respect;
• Transparency;
• Cultural competence; and
• Justice
Topics Explored:
• Use of Force
• Civilian Oversight
• Anti-Bias & Cultural Competency
• Accreditation & Accountability
• Community Policing
• Public Demonstration
• Special Prosecution
• Officer Wellness
• Use of Technology
Review the full list of calls to action from this working
group in the “Calls to Action” section of the report.

MUNICIPAL COURTS AND GOVERNANCE
Working Group Co-Chairs:
Commissioner Traci deVon Blackmon
Commissioner T.R. Carr
Desired Changes:
Just governance aimed at restoring community trust and
enforcing laws in fair and intended ways with a focus on:
• Restorative justice and equity;
• Judicial independence;
• Fiscal responsibility; and
• Transparency
Topics Explored:
• Uniform List of Rights
• Informing Public on Court Procedures and
Individual Rights
• Failure to Appear Charges
• Ability to Pay Hearings
• Restorative Justice
• Alternatives Sentences
• Establishment of Alternative Community Service
• Conflict of Interest
Review the full list of calls to action from
this working group in the “Calls to Action” section of the
report.

What is the impact of your solution
The report is the result of countless hours of thoughtful discussions between community leaders in the wake of the Ferguson uprising just a few years ago. It includes concrete steps we can take to address racial issues. Maybe we can help a bit here.

Our team took a look at an article on Wired that is similar to the problems our project is trying to solve. As such, we'd like to add it to the problem 2 documents and other media section to further reference.

Documents and other media

A Plan to Make Police Data Open Source Started on Reddit

Theme: Police and Judicial Reform and Accountability

Brief description of your idea:
Develops add-ons/extensions to social media platforms and other apps that allow the submitter or readers to flag a post as a potential police behavioral infraction and aggregate multiple posts from the same platform or different platform sources into events stored in a single repository that can be accessible via an API.

What makes your idea unique?:

• There are applications already developed where people can post pictures and information on police behavioral infractions. This would be the first cross-social media platform solution that merges multiple data sources into single Events view.
• This tool combines multiple inputs from various postings/platforms into a single view of an event.
• Using NLC/NLU, puts non-formatted data into standardized entities, concepts, and relations that can be queried and analyzed. It will use other methods to determine additional data such as location and date/time from pictures or text.
• Provides a traceback to the original source of information.
• Provides an assessment of the quality and verifiability of event information.
• Third-party applications supporting government, law enforcement, civic groups and individuals can access this data via APIs for a variety of purposes.

What would be the impact of your idea if implemented?:
Problem:
Victims and observers post pictures or describe incidents through non-official/governmental channels like social media platforms, or smartphone applications specifically designed for this reporting. For the same event, these postings can be from multiple people and placed on different social media platforms. In addition, these postings require individuals trying to gather information to manually find and then pull the facts from the individual postings and consolidate to provide a better picture of the event and identify if there is a likelihood of a police behavioral infraction or if this event is of a type that disproportionately targets the black community.

Benefits:
By using existing social media applications and an easy method for flagging existing content, this solution will likely have greater adoption and easier/faster input than those apps requiring users to download and separately input information.

By IBM providing an API accessible, central repository of machine-curated police behavioral infraction events, government, law enforcement, and civic groups can easily integrate data from third party sources with their official systems to identify discrepancies in reporting or flag events for further investigations.

Data Scientists will be able to more easily access third-party social media sources and integrate this information with other sources to provide a more comprehensive and verifiable picture of police behavioral infractions, providing the information for not only identifying problems, but measuring the success of programs and initiatives to address disparities.

Skills to contribute (e.g. development, architecture, research, design or anything else): Development, Architecture, Design, Host solution, Leading the engagement/cooperation with social media platform companies.

Problem 2 - The lack of transparent and accurate data available to assess police behavioral infractions means police reports can be falsified and contain other inaccuracies.

Theme:
Although they garner the most attention, altercations between law enforcement and individuals involving police brutality, unnecessary force, etc. do not make up the majority of police interactions. Most interactions involve police responding to calls for domestic abuse, suspected criminal activity, break-ins, etc. Public feedback on these interactions can help assess if there is any racial bias inherent in an officer's everyday actions which may lead to an increased chance of more serious altercations down the line.

Brief description of your idea:
A simple survey given to individuals with a verified police interaction could provide a wealth of data that can be analyzed. Questions regarding the officer's attitude and demeanor during the interaction, his willingness to listen and help, and many other factors could be asked. If the citizen agrees, their personal data can also be included to help determine if race, sexual orientation, or any other factors could be associated with the officer's handling of the situation. With multiple interactions every day, data for each individual officer would amass quickly and enable analysis for patterns of improper behavior, racial bias, or other red flags.

Survey validity would be a concern but negative survey responses could be cross-checked against body cam or dash cam footage as well as historical survey results for that office. For example, if a citizen submitted a negative survey response after receiving a speeding ticket, body cam footage could be used to verify/negate the citizen's claims. The point of the survey would be to assess how an officer handled a situation, not whether the situation resulted in a desired resolution for the citizen.

To ensure every citizen gets the opportunity to submit a survey after a police interaction, officers would be required to provide directions or a link to the survey to everyone they interact with as part of standard process. Follow-up calls from a 3rd party service could also be conducted to ensure survey links were provided. Repeated failure of an officer to provide surveys to the citizens he serves could be seen as another red flag.

What makes your idea unique?:
As stated in the problem, police reports can be inaccurate or falsified as the officer is the only one filling them out. Adding a mechanism for direct feedback from the individuals directly interacting with that officer in everyday settings would provide new data points that can be used for analysis of the officer's overall fitness.

What would be the impact of your idea if implemented?:
New data that could be used to analyze an officer's overall fitness, including racial or other inherent biases, propensity to escalate situations, or aggressiveness. This data could be used to help justify red flags or misconduct accusations in the future.

Skills to contribute (e.g. development, architecture, research, design or anything else):
Research and Development of user survey with questions whose responses could be analyzed for sentiment, bias, tone, etc.
A method to allow citizens to submit feedback securely and without fear of retaliation.
A method to ensure validity and accuracy of feedback, even from those users who were not happy with the outcome of their police interaction.

Update the "How tech can help" subsection of problem statement 2 to the following:

How tech can help

Technology can be used to measure the frequency of police behavioral infractions, such as, the unnecessary use of force or other aggressive tactics, and other incidents, which disproportionately target the black community. This will allow for the identification of any inherent biases that may have been associated with an incident. This data can subsequently be used to identify malicious police practices and help to improve relationships between the police and the communities which they swear to protect and serve.

Theme:

Brief description of your idea:
Leverage Blockchain technology to prevent law enforcement officers from: tampering with evidence captured digitally, chopping or deleting video recordings and audio recordings, tampering with police reports, etc. For example, utilizing this Blockchain based tool, the original copy/version of a police report would be immutable, and will always be traceable to the original version, who created it, timestamps, etc. This way, the assigned users can track how many times a police report was updated/changed, what information was changed or added, and by whom. This Blockchain tool could be part of a larger solution.

What makes your idea unique?:
At present, there may not be many solutions available which permanently captures and tracks all changes made to police reports, further creating potential to falsify information, tamper with documented information, etc.

What would be the impact of your idea if implemented?:
We need a way to protect evidence in its original form, i.e. body cam footage, dash cam footage

Skills to contribute (e.g. development, architecture, research, design or anything else):

• Will try to find supporting evidence, research
• Will need input from designers, developers, etc.

Note: I started this idea in a private boxnote last week when the challenge was first announced. I'm posting the whole thing as originally jotted down, not going to try to conform to the readme.md file stuff yet.

Police & judicial reform and accountability  definition

From traffic stops and arrests to sentencing and parole decisions, use technology to better analyze real-world data, provide insights and make recommendations that will drive racial equality and reform across criminal justice and public safety.

Ideas

Dash cam & Body cam analysis
Dash and body cam footage contains a potential treasure trove of information about implicit and explicit bias.  Human review of the information would require multiple person hours of work for each person hour of footage, making it a daunting (perhaps impossible) task to review everything.  Focusing on just questionable incidents gives less than a complete picture.  Automated analysis could cover the entirety of an officer's shift resulting in a much more detailed and balanced view.  Compiling statistical data over an entire force would determine the force's norms and individual officer variance from the norm, allowing biased officers to be identified.  Model non-biased officers can be identified and commended.

Additionally, by using information on all police - citizen contact instead of just incidents that result in an arrest or even incidents that result in biased outcomes, a true picture of the real overall conditions would be available.

Potential data feeds:

• Audio
• Video
• GPS location
• Dispatch and information feeds

Potential blocks to adoption (so that they can be considered up front)

• Consent of individuals captured in data for their image/speech to be used?
• Compliance?
• Confidentiality of ongoing investigations
• Requires "always on" recording, not just incident driven recording.

Functions

1. Identify race of participants when possible via video and/or correlation with official data

• An important aspect of this is, at what point does the video show it's reasonable the officer would know the race of other participants.  Use scaling to approximate human field of view and focus.

2. Use speech to text to transcribe audio

• When multiple voices present attempt to distinguish by voice characteristics
• Not just transcription, but changes in tone, volume, pace to indicate stress
• Watson speech analysis to categorize speech used in an incident
• Respectful/disrespectful
• Use of words which show explicit or implicit bias
• Use of words which indicate stress levels and moods of participants
• Escalation / de-escalation patterns

3. Analysis of video to identify behavior patterns

• Aggressive vs passive
• Erratic
• (category needs work)

4. Location information encoded throughout all data

• Facilitates correlation of differences in behavior as a function of location

5. Alert / call / news information encoded throughout all data

• Facilitates correlation of differences in behavior as a function of background information

Theme:
Police accountability and reform.

Brief description of your idea:
Put the community's support behind every person worried about being discriminated against during a police stop. The idea is to develop a mobile app that can livestream the moment a police stop begins until it ends, where then the user is prompted to submit his thoughts about the interaction with police. The anonymous form will contain the livestream URL (optional), an area for police badge number, name, precinct, and interaction rating.

This information will be saved into a community database for the locality. Think of it as Yelp for Police.

What makes your idea unique?:
It presents a community driven method of sharing incidents and thoughts on specific police precincts.

What would be the impact of your idea if implemented?:
Police can be held more accountable for their actions against the vulnerable members of our community. Users can feel safer knowing that they have an easy way to report and optionally livestream their police interactions into an organized database.

Skills to contribute (e.g. development, architecture, research, design or anything else):
Skills needed:
Mobile application development
Database management

Theme: Judicial Sentencing Reform

Brief description of your idea: This is NOT AI enabled sentencing
Use/reconfigure existing compare and comply or other NLP/NLC capabilities to provide judges, clerks, attorneys and others the ability to rapidly understand appropriate sentencing guidelines, sentencing histories of similar crimes, sentencing history of the local judiciary and judge to provide cognitive guidance on inappropriate sentencing. Use similar big data capabilities to apply to parole hearings to understand historical guidance and specific parole board history (based on race and other factors) for parole outcomes. Enable all participants to make accurate assessments of the appropriateness of a sentence (or even of a judge before going to trial)

What makes your idea unique?:
Application of known art to a specific use case. COO has not been performed but a brief google search does find similar tools used to apply sentencing based on defendant's history - this would be debiased data to apply sentencing logic to the judge, not the defendant

What would be the impact of your idea if implemented?:
This would be able to provide defendant, attorneys, judges and advocates the ability to rapidly assess possible outcomes as well as provide convincing arguments for most fair/appropriate sentencing. Most importantly this would enable attorneys to immediately address sentencing misconduct and raise objections.

Skills to contribute (e.g. development, architecture, research, design or anything else):

Repurpose of existing compare and comply API stack/cloud architecture
retraining of NLU for specific use case/application

Theme: Police and Judicial Reform

Brief description of your idea:
Tie together the solutions, data collected, algorithms created, processes automated, humans engaged and technologies implemented into one E2E intelligent workflow spanning from offense, arrest, hearings, pleas, sentencing, incarceration to parole, providing solutions across the entire process to key personas and enabling E2E transformation of the this painful and challenging process. listening to the playback today, so many great ideas, enthusiasm, engaged thinking, and innovative solutions - and if we can connect them, wire them together with a compassionate understanding of the personas and their interactions with eachother and technology - we can deliver capabilities that truly transform this process and experience for the Black community.

What makes your idea unique?:
Apply intelligence across the process - tying together point solutions into a transformative, data driven, debiased approach to the problem statements spanning this theme

What would be the impact of your idea if implemented?:
The ability to have visibility to data and outcomes, people and process, bias and mistakes, and more can enable the people in the process to provide opportunities to engage and transform outcomes for the accused and everyone in the process focusing directly on the problems of escalation, arrest and sentencing for Black Americans. This could lead to the outcomes we are looking for from b

Skills to contribute (e.g. development, architecture, research, design or anything else):
Intelligent workflow, design thinking, automation, process analysis, digital change, people skills and people skills

Theme:
Emb(race) Judicial Reform Problem Statement 3

Brief description of your idea:
We could provide a dashboard and an AI or ML-assisted recommendation engine to help judges with sentencing decisions. The inspiration would be something like IBM’s Compensation Advisor with Watson. The recommendation engine and dashboard could provide the full range of sentencing options for a specific person and crime, along with recommendations based on several factors. It would also be very helpful if the engine highlighted the reasons for its recommendations, and displayed all of the data used to make it recommendation.

For example:
Options - Community Service, $5000 fine, 1 week in jail
Recommended - 20 hours of community service; reasons - first conviction, ability to pay
OR
Recommended - time already served; reason - already served 1 week; a typical sentence for this crime is 1-2 weeks

Racial profile data should be visible to the judges, but we would need to be careful to de-bias any AI or ML to make sure it doesn't actually perpetuate unfair sentencing! For example, if black Americans are more likely to serve longer sentences for a given crime, the engine should not continue to recommend longer sentences for them. In fact, it might be more productive to recommend sentences based on the sentences white/privileged people are given.

It would also be helpful to give judges feedback on their own performance with respect to sentencing fairness across racial lines.

What makes your idea unique?:
This could be helpful to judges, which would increase adoption.

What would be the impact of your idea if implemented?:
Give judges the data and options they need to counter racial bias in sentencing.

Skills to contribute (e.g. development, architecture, research, design or anything else):
Development, architecture, IT Ops

Is your suggestion related to a problem? Please describe.
It is important that the problem statement be written with clarity so the solutions being proposed and assessed can be evaluated effectively. I feel that the Problem Statement # 2 and associated hill needs to be revised to clearly state the user base and objective. Below is the current Problem Statement:

Problem Statement 2: "The lack of transparent and accurate data available to assess police behavioral infractions means police reports can be falsified and contain other inaccuracies."

This statement identifies two different but related issues:

1. Lack of transparent and accurate data to assess police behavioral infractions
2. Police reports can be falsified and contain other inaccuracies

The one Hill described doesn’t address the identified problem. It proposes using “technology to screen and expedite police reports for inherent biases while flagging incident reports for immediate review so that issues/incidents are addressed proactively with immediate consequences.” The problem statement identifies the lack of transparency and accuracy of available data and the ability for police reports to be falsified or inaccurate. It does not identify any issues with inherent bias being a cause for either of these two issues.

What is your proposed solution?
Revise the Problem Statement to be the following:

Problem Statement 2: The process of collecting accurate, complete, and verifiable police incidence response data and the ability for appropriate parties that provide management oversight, and compliance verification is susceptible inaccuracies and false claims documented in the police reports, inadequate and biased analysis and review of the incidence, and clarity and transparency in identifying systemic issues both in reporting accuracy and behavior for an individual or group of individual police officers. This problem could potentially create the following issues:

1. Police officers that are responding to incidents are inaccurately reporting the response and the situation leading to the response in existing police reporting systems.
2. The police management, police departments, or other related organizations (DA, Internal Affairs, labor unions) are either intentionally or unintentionally not adequately collecting, investigating, or assessing the police officer response information.
3. The police departments are not providing the data with appropriate transparency to oversight organizations or the public to assess the correctness of police responses to incidents and to raise concerns.

We would develop a Hill for each of the above three potential issues.

What is the impact of your solution
Revising the Problem Statement and Hills will lead to better alignment of the proposed solution(s) to the problem statement.

Theme

Problem Statement 1, Hill 2

Law enforcement has technology embedded in their equipment to help objectively assess accurate threat level and provide guidance on appropriate threat response in real time.

Brief description of your idea

Use AI/machine learning/analytics to pre-assess the threat level of a situation prior to officers responding to an incident. The goal is to increase accountability, scrutiny, and consequence through knowledge and analytics to reduce conflict escalation as much as possible.

The foundation of this idea is this equation:

low threat + high use of force = high level of scrutiny

The proposed idea would provide the [low|medium|high] threat part of this equation and would rely on data and reporting from solutions such as #1 to determine the level of force that was used and how this relates to the expected outcome of the situation. These two factors would then dictate an appropriate level of scrutiny, accountability, and consequence.

Some details

When officers respond to incidents, they are undoubtedly given some information prior to arriving, but I am not sure what this set of information includes. I believe that this set of information could be changed based on research, analytics, and real-time data to give citizens and officers the best possible chance of low-escalation conflict resolution.

The key would be to come up with an "estimated threat level" of a given situation/incident based on AI, machine learning, and analytics. This threat level and other relevant details will be relayed to the officer and must be acknowledged prior to arriving at the scene. Based on the threat level, it will be established that certain uses of force or weaponry will be scrutinized much more heavily in low-severity situations than in those with significantly higher estimated threat levels. The model should use concrete facts and data that factor out racial bias as a basis for threat severity.

What makes your idea unique?

I believe this idea is unique because it represent a proactive approach. The key to this implementation is determining which factors are most useful in generating an estimated threat level, and communicating this in an effective way to responding officers.

The threat modeling could pull data from a number of sources, depending on which result in the best trained predictive models. Some examples of data sources might be:

• Historical data for relevant incident types
• Historical crime data for relevant area
• Typical tactics used in these types of incidents
• Best options for de-escalation for relevant incident types
• Time of day
• Visibility/available light/weather
• How busy an area currently is (i.e. how many people are around)
• What events are going on in the area (public social media info)
• Officer's estimated stress level based on driving characteristics or heat rate data
• Number of responding officers
• Data from bystanders (though this has a large potential for any number of biases)
• etc...

What would be the impact of your idea if implemented?

The main impacts are accountability and awareness. Awareness arms officers with knowledge in favor of force before stepping into a situation. Accountability stresses "real consequence" when deviating from anticipated behavior based on predictive models.

Skills to contribute (e.g. development, architecture, research, design or anything else)

This would probably need:

• User Researcher to investigate types of data we can obtain and their levels of success
• Data scientist and architect to help generate and train AI models, and to help provide the correct interfaces into the generated models I have some minimal understanding of AI/machine learning, but not a lot
• Developer to create an application law enforcement can use that interfaces with the AI models I am a developer and could definitely fill this role
• Designer to create best possible presentation to law enforcement to stress accountability and awareness
• Possibly others?

Name:
Steven Rosenberg

Theme:
Policy and Judicial Reform

Brief description of your idea:
Mobile Application that allows recording of events with the click of a button with a communication module to alert others in the area that the events are being recorded. It also activates other mobile devices to start recording to obtain a broader view of the events. Feeds shall be sent to a centralized area that can then be used for future reference. This allows for all connected to know that the event is being recorded which may mitigate undesired results and behavior, as well as provide for multiple views so that events can be interpreted more clearly after the fact as well as provide for more balanced evidence.

What makes your idea unique?:
It makes it easier and quicker to activate mobile devices and adds the cloud based communication feeds for connecting to, activating and notifying other devices of the unfolding emergency events.

What would be the impact of your idea if implemented?:
Improved and more balanced coverage of events, ability to record events from multiple views for providing enhanced evidence and for modifying behavior in real time for all parties concerned. It can also include sensor data collected by police that can monitor the health and state of others.

Skills to contribute (e.g. development, architecture, research, design or anything else):
Mobile Application development, Server based Cloud solutions for implementing communication based system for collecting, storing and retrieving data, Inter mobile device communication, interfacing with sensor devices and collection of data, etc.