Tech Brew Ride Home - Technology and Policing with Matt Stroud, Author of the Book Thin Blue Lie

Episode Date: March 17, 2019

How technology has impacted policing has come up on this show far more than you would expect, if you think about it. So, when listener of the show Matt Stroud got in touch to talk about his new book about the impact of technology on policing, I said: yes please. The book is coming out this week, it's called Thin Blue Lie: The failure of high tech policing. Reading the book, a couple of things surprised me. As you'll hear, policing wasn't very tech or data driven until very recently, and like in other areas, it just seems like throwing technology at a problem, does not solve everything magically. In fact, there can be serious unintended consequences. And also, I was surprised how much the theme and anecdotes in the book lined up with some of the things we've discussed on this show. IE: technology is a tool, but data and gadgets still need a human element to be used effectively, especially when you're dealing with, you know, humans. Subscribe to the Premium, Ad-Free Feed! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Meme Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough. How technology has impacted policing has come up on the show far more than certainly I would have expected.

So when listener of the show Matt Stroud got in touch to ask if he could come on and talk about his new book, looking at the impact of technology on policing, I said, yes, please. The book is coming out this week. It's called Thin Blue Lie, the Failure of High Tech. policing. Link in the show notes. Reading the book. A couple of things surprise me. As you'll hear, policing wasn't very tech or data driven until very recently. And like in other areas, it just seems like throwing technology at a problem does not solve everything magically. In fact, there can be serious unintended consequences. And also, I was surprised how much the theme and anecdotes in the book

lined up with some of the things we've discussed on the show, i.e., technology is a tool, but data and gadgets and all that good stuff, still need a human element to be used effectively, especially when you're dealing with, you know, humans. Again, the book is called Thin Blue Lie, the Failure of High Tech Policing, by listener of the show Matt Stroud, available this week from Metropolitan Books. Matt, reading your book, it sort of strikes me that until very recently, policing was not very technological at all. Like, basically things were done the same way throughout.

the entire 20th century, maybe even going back to the 19th century, it was all about, you know, I don't know, people on the street, you know, manpower, that sort of thing. And it's only in, like, literally the last couple decades that this sort of, as you call it, like the police industrial complex has sort of risen up. It's true. Yeah. The, um, the, like the, the, the quote that, actually the data that I have here is like, you say in the book, like, between 19881 and 2012, the amount of tax money spent on police balloon from about $16 billion to $126 billion, so that's like a 200% increase. And it's all mostly being spent on these new technological solutions that companies have

come up with. I don't know that I can make that generalization. I think that there were a number of factors. In the 1970s, you had a crime wave. and people were very concerned about it. And so when politicians and citizens came forward to complain about that crime wave, which was happening all over the country, you had government representatives who were much more willing to spend money on that. And so it was, it involved hiring. It involved spending on equipment like radios and cars.

and it also involved spending on the kinds of things that I'm interested in in the book, which is non-lethal weapons, computer statistics, developing predictive policing models and hiring companies to take care of your predictive policing and policing in general. So the money was spent in a lot of ways that happened to encapsulate the technologies and products that I'm interested in. Well, and, you know, I'm looking at it through the lens of thinking about the tech industry every day. And it sort of reminds me of, you know, things like for decades now, we've been throwing technology and money at education. But test scores really haven't changed. And like you sort of rail in the book against this technological solutionism.

Like, well, if we can just throw some technology at it, everything will be better. So, like, just as a general thesis, the technological. solutionism has it made policing more effective better? Not from what I've seen. And you have to keep in mind that I'm not a police officer. I'm not a government agent of any type. This is all what I've been able to glean as a journalist and as somebody who, you know, read studies on this kind of thing.

But the example that I come back to in the book repeatedly is the example of the taser. You have circumstances that arise in most prominently in the 60s and 70s and early 80s where, you know, these are, there are police shootings. You have examples of circumstances where, you know, people will pull out a knife and end up getting shot in the hail of bullets by police officers. And this starts to become more and more of an issue. Obviously, we've seen these kinds of, issues develop around Ferguson and other police killings now. But they really started to gain traction in the 60s and 70s. And people who represented governments, police leaders needed some kind of solution to quell the anger that emerged after, you know, people were being shot and killed by police officers.

And those killings were received attention. And the taser emerged as a solution to that, a way that police leaders and mayors of different cities could step forward and say, listen, we are, we're doing something about this. We are not ignoring this problem. We realize that this is a problem. And we are going to spend money on this non-lethal weapon that can help us to solve this problem. And the problem was whether it was explicitly stated in each of these circumstances or not, that police use firearms more frequently than they should and in circumstances where they might choose another kind of weapon, and that they don't use de-escalation tactics in ways that they should.

And when you look at the most, well, there's one very robust, study that I tend to go back to and rely on what I'm talking about these issues, but it was done out of the University of Chicago, and it was studying taser use by the Chicago Police Department, starting in 2010 and going up until, I believe, 2017, something like 35,000 use of force incidents. And what that study found is that tasers did not reduce use of firearms among police officers at all, And it's unclear whether the tasers influenced de-escalation tactics or changed the way that police de-escalated circumstances. And so that's a pretty statistically significant study. And it seems to show that tasers don't do what they are supposed to do.

And there's also the matter that tasers have been shown to be involved in killing people, in killing people. Right. So in a sense, it's like not only is the technology not the panacea that the politicians and police departments hope, but it also there's there's also these unintended or unanticipated side consequences and new problems that arise with the technology as well. Yes, indeed. Thank you for raining me in there. I realize I was on a bit of a rant. No, no, that was great. Well, you do talk a lot about Taser in the book.

and like it is even sort of like a story of like like a company that that becomes hugely successful and is like a you know a meteoric stock and all this stuff because it does seem for a time to be like you know the next big thing so like there's almost like a taser bubble there in the early 2000s but then like it's it it it sort of is a bubble that pops and you know tasers aren't considered to be the sort of technological panacea that they thought they would be 20 years ago or so? I mean, among police leaders, I think they consider them to be that. They popped in terms of the stock market, right? Because there was an investigation into Taser International about claims of sales, particular sales,

and whether or not TASERS were actually non-lethal, which went against, or what, you know, Yeah, I mean, whether or not they could kill, which went against what the leaders of the company were disclosing to shareholders. And so, you know, there was definitely a bubble that popped financially for them. But, I mean, tasers are on the duty belts of police officers in just about every one of the police departments in the United States. And so saying that this is, this was a fad, it certainly is not. Right, gotcha. Acer's are big business and they remain big business for that company. So I love the story of sort of the birth of CompStat.

Like, CompStat literally means computer statistics. So, like, again, from my lens of technology, like, this is data, big data coming into policing. But there's a guy at Alain's on the Upper East Side and he notices that, like, you know, you can check the receipts and you can be the manager of a restaurant and know at a glance, like how the night's gone and that sort of thing. And there was literally nothing like that for policing. And again, it's right, that kind of blows my mind that. And so this is in the 70s and 80s that just the idea of tracking statistics was sort of like a revolutionary concept.

Yeah. And that guy, Jack Maple, I mean, he is held up as being, you know, a true, like perhaps the number one innovator in the history of policing over the last 50 years. And really what he and Bill Bratton did was very, very simple. I mean, looking at a map and plotting where crimes happened on that map. First, they were literally doing this on giant maps of New York City and in Bratton's case, Boston, on their walls and trying to figure out where crimes happen. It's so simple. And you're right, it's surprising that it took so long for that kind of statistical analysis to happen. But it really influenced how policing works.

And is it continuing a pace at this point? Like are we either already at a point where, you know, there's law enforcement by algorithm and like slicing and dicing all of the data points down to like literally the, you know, curbside level and that sort of thing? Has it has that continued to evolve and maybe even accelerate in policing right now? It's tough to generalize. Big police departments, the NYPD. I get press releases from companies all the time talking to me about new initiatives at the NYPD and LAPD, Sacramento Police Department, how they're trying out new forms of statistical analysis to help them with their policing. But, you know, I know cops all over the country who are, they work for smaller departments. And a lot of those smaller departments, they just have cops driving around in cars and, you know, occasionally walking beach.

and data analysis is not a big part of what they do. I mean, I'm just speaking anecdotally, but you kind of have to look at it that way. There are 18,000 police departments in the United States, and each one of them operate a little bit differently than the municipality that's right next to them are from LAPD. And many of them don't have the budgets to do the kind of statistical analysis that Jack Maple started instituting in New York. York City. And so it's, you know, on a broad level, I think police leaders want to move in that direction and try to move in that direction. But if you're a police chief at a municipality with, you know, a thousand people and you've got yourself and one or two part-time employees doing all of the policing in your district, like, well, you're probably not going to use data all that much.

You're probably just going to respond to calls. Another thing that I was surprised wasn't widely deployed until super, super recently was CCD cameras. And actually, like, to bring it closer to stuff that we talk about a lot on the show, how about the concept of surveillance policing? And I'm not even talking yet about cell phone tracking. I'm talking about, is this the wave of the future, not just cameras everywhere, but like using things like, facial recognition and things like that. And again, it might come to your point of, like, well, if you're in a small municipality, you might not deploy this.

But then maybe you would because it would be a cost-saving thing. So the idea of, you know, video surveillance policing. Is that the wave of the future right now? Is video surveillance the wave of the future? Well, so the reason I ask that is because I'm doing stories all the time about how in China, like the authorities are deploying all over the place, even tracking crowds. So at every sporting event or even outside of every subway station, they deploy the cameras.

They use the facial recognition software. And then it's not just about, well, watching that a crime happens. They're like tracking, well, this is that person and they left their house at this time and that sort of thing. They can track people throughout the day, throughout their movements in a city. Yeah, they can do that here too. And there have been, you know, stories that have been published about police use of, license plate readers and using that as a way to track people from place to place if there's, you know, even a hint that they might want to search or, you know, serve a warrant to somebody

on a particular issue. So you hear about those issues occasionally. I think they're, and maybe I'm giving culture in the United States and people in the United States a little bit more credit than they deserve. But I think that there is a skepticism about that kind of surveillance broadly in the United States. And as I understand it, China is not a part of my book and neither of the citizens of China. But as I understand it, there is less of a skepticism about that in China. And so when those programs roll out in China, they are not as frowned upon as they are here. Right.

Not controversial. Yeah. So I would say that. And I would also say that, you know, we do have a robust system of journalism. And the programs that have gotten a lot of attention in the United States surrounding facial recognition, they often show that the facial recognition doesn't work very well. So there's an anecdote that I talk about in the book. It involves, I forget which number Super Bowl it was, but it was like 2001, where a bunch of companies got together and decided that they were going to install. facial recognition technology on all of the cameras at the Super Bowl.

And then after the Super Bowl happened, they sent out press releases saying, like, hey, look what we did. And there was very much an uproar afterwards, you know, asking why this needed to be done and what happened. And there was a subsequent three-year study that was done in a city that is spelled Y-B-O-R city, Y-B-O-R city. Ebor City, yeah. They pronounce it.

Like a three-year study to use that facial recognition and try to use facial recognition to execute warrants in Ebor City. And it didn't find one person to handle warrant out to. So it completely failed. And there haven't really been any major studies that have shown facial recognition to be useful to put. police in any significant way since then. You've had companies that have stepped forward and say they're interested in trying.

Like the company that I referenced, Taser International, which is now known as Axon Enterprise, they have, there has been discussion about trying to use facial recognition on body cameras. But I believe the CEO of that company has said that they are not going to push forward with it. There's been discussion around Amazon and Amazon trying to do more around facial recognition and get police departments to try to adopt facial recognition technology for cameras. But as I understand it, that hasn't gone really far yet either. So we're still in a good place when it comes to that. At the same time, we do have cameras everywhere.

So I don't know. You happen to be talking to a Florida boy so I can vouch for the pronunciation of EBRS. Yeah, so what about the cell phone revolution and the idea that now we are all of us carrying around these tracking devices. In theory, actually my question would be, where is the law on that right now? Obviously, there are still things like warrants and things like that that need to be gotten from courts and stuff. but is it still sort of influx the push and pool about how much information, say, a police department can get from a cell company, your carrier, that sort of thing? Like, where are we in terms of the law with cell phones and actually tracking where you are every minute of the day? I don't think law enforcement agencies and police departments right now are tracking where people are every moment of the day.

I think the discussion right now is related to, and a lot of the legal discussion right now is related to when you can access someone's data on someone's phone. Like at what point they can essentially jailbreak, like when they can go into a phone to get information. Right, I've done tons of stories on that. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's primarily where the discussion. is now. And, you know, keep in mind, my interest is in local law enforcement, is in, you know, like the NYPD. And I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so the city of Pittsburgh Police Department, like local municipalities. I'm not looking into the NSA or, you know, other federal agencies

that might be tracking cell phone data on a much broader level. That's a whole different discussion. Well, it, you know, it's funny because it has to be frustrating for police, because it's almost like, well, here's this device that will basically solve the crime for us. You know, if we can just get in all this information, it's all right there. So there's that pesky Fourth Amendment, you know? Right, right, exactly. So the, how are police thinking about how cell phones have changed the way that they do their job? Not only is it not only is it the treasure trove of all the data, but then it's almost like it's hiding.

information that used to be that used to have physical traces like are police frustrated with with cellular technology with smartphones and not only for that but also because obviously they all have cameras on them now so aside from body cameras like now everybody is is watching police all the time everybody's watching police all the time so i think there's some frustration around that but also you know as uh as things change and as police become, you know, I mean, they use cell phones all the time too. There are body camera systems that are built around them carrying their own cell phones. And where there's, there might be some lack of statistical analysis in small municipalities that I talked about. I mean, almost

every police officer that I know carries around a cell phone and uses that as a way to respond to calls. So while there's got to be some frustration for detectives for people who are working on big cases and realizing that if they were able to get into somebody's phone, they might find a treasure trove of information that might allow them to arrest someone or convict them or help to convict them, I think there is a lot that police gain as we use cell more and more frequently because they're they're taking advantage of the technology too well and then we're we've already had stories like this we now have surveillance devices inside of everybody's homes so we've had cases where you know the cops are going to amazon and being like you know um you there was an

alexa speaker in the room where the murder happened but that's still i guess another case where there's that pesky fourth amendment right yeah there's the pesky fourth amendment um the the The situation that I think of when you bring that up is actually with a technology called ShotSpotter. Have you heard of this? But explain. So there is a, there was a case that I don't have it in front of me. I don't even know that I referenced in the book, but it's interesting. There is a case where, so ShotSpotter, part of their sales pitch, and they're a publicly traded company,

part of their sales pitch is that they have this special technology that tells police specifically where a firearm was, shot. So like if a if a shot is fired somewhere anywhere near a shot spot or speaker, then police will get a notification. Here's the exact coordinates of where the shot was, where the firearm was shot. So go there right now. So you know, for for cops, this is great. It's you know, they can they can get information about where a shot is fired without anybody having to to call 911. And part of their pitch is this is special technology. It's It's not actually a recording device. It's not recording anyone's voice.

It is specifically designed just for that concussive sound of a shot being fired. And then triangulating the location. Exactly. That's the technology. But there was a case. I want to say it was in the Bay Area in 2010, 2011, where someone was actually convicted because they said something that was close enough to a. a shot spotter device where the device could pick it up and it was then used in court.

So that kind of situation, that, I mean, those devices, shot spotter devices are in public. And so the Fourth Amendment questions that would arise from cops trying to get access to your, you don't say the Amazon, the name of the Amazon. Right, A-L-E-X-A. Right. it's a different circumstance than trying to gain access to your Google Home or whatever because it's in public. But, I mean, I imagine that's the next, you know, frontier of data gathering for speakers

is, you know, when your Google Home, when you can act, when police can access that and under what circumstances. I mean, that's going to be a question for the future, I imagine. So, final question. By the way, again, the book is titled, blue lie, the failure of high-tech policing. So if just throwing money and technology at policing is not a panacea, do you have any thoughts on what would make policing more effective, either in terms of fighting crime or being more accurate or being more humane? What would

just be some big-picture solutions that you think might actually improve policing? When people talk about ComStat, they make reference to the computer statistics, right? They make reference to the fact that you're taking statistics and then using those as a way to put cops on the street where you think crime might happen, right? But what that misses is that part of the Comstatt program was not only built around that, but also being. built around having meetings among precinct commanders, these legendary meetings that would happen in buildings within the NYPD, I'm forgetting the name of the building, but where police would talk about their districts, their precincts, and the kinds of crimes that they were seeing and how they were going to address those crimes and how they were going to be up.

part of the community as a way to address those crimes. And that combined with the statistical analysis made it so that those commanders really knew their districts and had to know what each one of their cops were doing. Well, you know, ideally not each one. But, you know, they would know a lot more about what their, what the police who were operating there were actually doing and how they were addressing crime. It was a holistic solution that went way beyond just this one technology. And what has emerged since then is that people really latch on to the idea that there is this statistical analysis. And that was the solution. When the solution was actually this holistic approach to policing and understanding more about the communities that were being

policed and understanding more about the crimes that were occurring there and how those crimes could be addressed. I think that when people think about how, when, you know, police leaders think about how to address crime and how to address big problems, they need to think more holistically about those problems. When you have, you know, a circumstance where somebody is shot and killed by police and there is a, there's dissent that emerges as a result of it, the solution, the problem, or the, the problem, or The way that police leaders have addressed this, and part of which I railed against in my book, is that they'll say, all right, I'm going to spend $5 million on tasers so that officers on the beat have a non-lethal solution. And that is supposed to solve the problem. When the problem might actually be that the police officers who are working this beat don't actually understand their community as well as they do, they haven't given enough thought to address the problems that are there in the community and the kind of people who they were.

they will interact with. And so that is my general suggestion that the solution to the crime problems that have emerged over the last decades is one of understanding the communities that are being police better and creating better relationships between the police who are on the street and their leaders and the communities that they serve. it's not just a technological solution that will solve these problems. It is one of being part of a community. That's much of it.

Yeah, and that's what really lined up to me thematically with what we talk about every day on this show is that technology is great. It's a great tool. The data and the algorithms and all that stuff can be really, really useful, but you can't, you still need the human element, especially when your job is to deal with humans Yeah, right. And be out in the real world dealing with actual humanity. You still need the human element.

Indeed.