The Central California city of Santa Cruz became the first city in the nation to ban the use of predictive policing software by their police department. The City Council voted 7-0 to end the use of the software by ordinance due to its reinforcement of racial bias in policing.
The ordinance, which was introduced by Mayor Justin Cummings, the first Black mayor in Santa Cruz history, went into effect in a city that was one of the first adopters of the technology.
Predpol, a leading company in the field, is headquartered in Santa Cruz, and some members of county government were involved with the startup. Other municipalities have started and then stopped using Predpol and other predictive policing technologies, but Santa Cruz is the first to pass legislation concretizing that the policing software may not be used.
In the same ordinance, Santa Cruz joined the California cities of San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley and became the 8th city nationwide to ban the use of facial recognition in the past year. The facial recognition ban comes as IBM announces they are discontinuing their facial recognition product and Microsoft and Amazon announced moratoriums on the sale of the product to law enforcement agencies.
The Santa Cruz bans were introduced in January 2020, after Mayor Cummings, then the city’s vice-mayor, participated in an ACLU and Oakland Privacy panel on the dangers of facial recognition held in Santa Cruz at the Resource Center for Non-Violence. ACLU’s Santa Cruz chapter, and Oakland Privacy worked with the City for 6 months to finalize the bans which passed unanimously on June 23rd.
Protests against racist policing have rocked Santa Cruz, as they have most of country, and followed revelations of federal surveillance of UCSC graduate students striking for cost of living increases. Santa Cruz police were called to Oakland for mutual aid during protests against the murder of George Floyd.
Santa Cruz police chief Andrew Mills supported the bans, telling Reuters that he “didn’t want to be in a place where are are targeting people of color based on a computer system”.
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