Huh, yeah, I disagree. It seems to me pretty fundamental to a justice system’s credibility that it not imprison one person and free another when the only difference between them is the color of their skin (or, yes, their height), and it makes a lot of sense to me that U.S. law mandates sacrificing predictive power in order to maintain this feature of the system.
If the crime was performed by someone who had to be at least 2m tall, and one of the suspects is 2.10m and other one is 1.60m tall, then it seems really obvious to me that you should use their height as evidence? I would be deeply surprised if you think otherwise.
If the crime was performed by someone who had to be at least 2m tall, and one of the suspects is 2.10m and other one is 1.60m tall, then it seems really obvious to me that you should use their height as evidence?
That’s not what these articles describe—the algorithm in question wasn’t being used to determine whether a suspect had committed a crime, it was being used for risk assessment, ie determine the probability that a person convicted of one crime will go on to commit another.
If the crime was performed by someone who had to be at least 2m tall, and one of the suspects is 2.10m and other one is 1.60m tall, then it seems really obvious to me that you should use their height as evidence? I would be deeply surprised if you think otherwise.
That’s not what these articles describe—the algorithm in question wasn’t being used to determine whether a suspect had committed a crime, it was being used for risk assessment, ie determine the probability that a person convicted of one crime will go on to commit another.