Risk Assessment Biases | Stats + Stories Episode 147

Protestors have taken to streets across the U-S this summer in order to fight back against what they see as an unjust criminal justice system – one that treats People of Color in prejudicial and violent ways. The concern over racial bias in policing has long been a concern of activists, but there’s an increasing focus on other ways racial bias might influence decisions made in America’s courts and police stations. The statistics related to race and the criminal justice system is a focus of this episode of Stats and Stories. Tarak Shah is a data scientist at HRDAG, where he cleans and processes data and fits models in order to understand evidence of human rights abuses. Prior to his position at HRDAG, he was the Assistant Director of Prospect Analysis at University of California, Berkeley, in the University Development and Alumni Relations, where he developed tools and analytics to support major gift fundraising. What spurred this research?(1:33) What is a risk assessment model? (2:12) What ore these tools suppose to do? (4:00) What is fairness? (5:18) What did you learn? (10:12) What is the takeaway for the layperson? (15:20) What’re some parallels to this work? (19:35) How do you make this interesting? (22:07) What’s the flow of your work, for reproducibility? (25:00)