Remove the scary word "algorithm" and this whole issue seems blown up around something fairly mundane. If the police hand calculated how many crime reports came from each area no one would care.
People are so scared of algorithms. There is now scientific evidence confirming that severe distrust of algorithms is a pervasive human bias. Search for "algorithm aversion". They do trust them when they are believed to be infallible, but as soon as they learn they can make mistakes, they vastly underestimate them. And this is a damn shame, because in almost every case even very simple statistical procedures outperform human "experts".
Worse is this nonsense that algorithms can be "racist". As if a computer can have prejudice or care about anything other than maximizing accuracy. The media loves to fuel this narrative. E.g. the big hoopla when Google's image tagger tagged a black person as a gorilla. They had to remove it and apologize.
People are so scared of algorithms. There is now scientific evidence confirming that severe distrust of algorithms is a pervasive human bias. Search for "algorithm aversion". They do trust them when they are believed to be infallible, but as soon as they learn they can make mistakes, they vastly underestimate them. And this is a damn shame, because in almost every case even very simple statistical procedures outperform human "experts".
Worse is this nonsense that algorithms can be "racist". As if a computer can have prejudice or care about anything other than maximizing accuracy. The media loves to fuel this narrative. E.g. the big hoopla when Google's image tagger tagged a black person as a gorilla. They had to remove it and apologize.