LAPD Allegedly Goes All ‘Minority Report’ on Actual Minorities

“Minority Report,” the popular movie directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise, deals with a future where the crime rate is low, thanks to the government's predictive abilities which allow authorities to track down people who are about to commit a crime.

While this might seem like a concept that belongs to the realm of science fiction, it seems the Los Angeles Police Department has been using a similar system, although it appears to target only actual minorities.

In a recent lawsuit, the LAPD was forced to release documents about its surveillance algorithm called Palantir, which was meant to predict crimes. The lawsuit was filed by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, and the documents found their way to In Justice Today.

According to the documents, the algorithm uses a formula to track down people whom the LAPD call “probable offenders,” or figures who they believe are most likely to be chronic offenders. The police department argued that thanks to the system, crime rates can be reduced. Suffice it to say, the said coalition disagreed.

The system was described as being a “racist feedback loop” in which supposed chronic offenders are trapped in a circle of crime simply because they are being specifically targeted. What’s more, it disproportionately targets minorities and people of color, Futurism notes.

This isn’t necessarily the fault of Palantir either since the data that an algorithm can produce is only as good as what it is fed. If it is fed with the demonstrably racist views of a police department that has been mathematically proven to concentrate on minorities, it’s only natural that its conclusions would follow this train of thought.

This Twitter thread drives home the point of how close this real-life concept is to the plot of “Minority Report.” Watching the movie might also help make the parallels more obvious.