2022 Fall BTLJ Race & Tech Symposium

As algorithmic decision-making and invasive surveillance technologies have become increasingly entangled with the U.S. criminal legal system, it has also become increasingly clear that these technologies and their applications often replicate and amplify existing racial disparities. Predictive policing, pretrial risk assessment, and algorithmic sentencing tools replicate racial bias, yet IP protections make examining and challenging their use difficult. Geofence warrants, facial recognition technology, and video surveillance are disproportionately used to target black and brown communities despite known reliability issues. Invasive applications and tools like ShotSpotter and Clearview AI are bought and deployed by law enforcement agencies with little oversight or attention paid to the harms they cause.

But technology and the law can also be instruments for structural change. The third annual BTLJ-CMTL-BCLT Race & Technology Law Symposium will address a spectrum of privacy and reliability issues raised by the intersection of race and technology at each stage of the criminal justice process, but the focus will be on solutions and reforms for a more just and transparent system.

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