ABSTRACT
Systemic police violence against Black individuals and marginalized communities in the United States has contributed to reignite the associated debate regarding the fairness, accountability, and ethics of algorithmic decision-making in policing and criminal justice. This chapter seeks to contribute to this critical debate, arguing that although algorithmic approaches still hold promises to benefit society, a “reframe and reform” process is warranted, and that research should have a central role in it. This chapter first proposes two intertwined goals to increase the positive social impact of algorithms in crime research. These are the (1) elimination of the discrimination and disparate impact caused by current algorithmic decision-making systems and (2) a reframe of the focus of computational crime research toward problems, practices, and governance mechanisms that are more inclusive and more prone to protect weaker strata of the population rather than punish. Second, this chapter outlines four pathways that could help reaching such goals. These encompass (a) the increasing integration and exchange between scientific disciplines and communities working in the area, (b) the improvement of educational offers, (c) the widening of the scope outside the United States and the Western world, and (d) the investigation of human knowledge and perceptions about algorithmic research applied to crime research.
