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125 Colum. L. Rev. Forum 1 (2025)

handle is hein.journals/sidbarc125 and id is 1 raw text is: COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW FORUM VOL. 125 JANUARY 31, 2025 PAGES 1-28 POLICE TECHNOLOGY EXPERIMENTS Elizabeth E. Joh* Police departments often adopt new surveillance technologies that make mistakes, produce unintended effects, or harbor unforeseen problems. Sometimes the police try a new surveillance technology and later abandon it due to a lack of success, community resistance, or both. Critics have identified many problems with these tools: racial bias, privacy violations, opacity, secrecy, and undue corporate influence, to name a few. A diferent framework is needed. This Piece considers the growing use of these algorithmic surveillance technologies and argues that they function as experiments on human subjects. Such technology experiments result in police reliance on automated systems to engage in investigative stops and consensual encounters and to increase police presence and surveillance in a community. In acting as experiments on human subjects, these tools often function poorly. Moreover, ethical considerations that are common in the conventional human subjects- research context are entirely absent, even though the new technologies involve uncontrolled experiments on people. And because these algorithmic surveillance technologies are often adopted in low-income communities of color, they raise particularly sensitive concerns about ethics and experimentation borne out by historical experience. By understanding the adoption of new algorithmic surveillance tools as experiments on human subjects, we can develop prospective controls and methods of evaluation for the use of these tools by police, ones that balance innovation with ethical responsibility as artificial intelligence becomes a normal part of police investigations. 1 * Professor, University of California, Davis, School of Law (King Hall). Many thanks to Nila Bala,Jack Chin, Eric Fish, TomJoo, Chimene Keitner, and the librarians of the Mabie Law Library.

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