The Brennan Center for Justice and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund are holding a full-day symposium on “Policing Race and Technology” on Dec. 3, 2019. The symposium aims to center the racial justice issues raised by modern surveillance technologies such as facial recognition, predictive policing, and social media monitoring tools.

Through panels and discussion, this symposium will explore topics such as:

• The deployment of surveillance technologies in the face of well-documented error rates when analyzing communities of color, and the ways in which their unchecked use threatens to obscure and automate racial inequalities under the guise of unbiased computer systems;

• The need to analyze the use of surveillance tools in the context of well-established racial biases in policing, which has knock-on effects on the criminal justice system;

• Issues raised by using surveillance technologies in tandem, such as their exacerbated impact on communities of color and the creation of a pervasive dragnet that is incompatible with a democratic society; and
• The different approaches to regulation, including outright bans (enacted for facial recognition in cities such as San Francisco and Somerville, MA), efforts to pass transparency measures (enacted in cities such as Seattle and Nashville, TN), and the role of inspector general audits (influential reports in Los Angeles and Chicago).

Learn more and register for the event here.