Latent Racial Bias – Evaluating Racism in Police Stop-and-Searches

05/08/2020

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by   Akbir Khan, et al.

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In this paper, we introduce the latent racial bias, a metric and method to evaluate the racial bias within specific events. For the purpose of this paper we explore the British Home Office dataset of stop-and-search incidents. We explore the racial bias in the choice of targets, using a number of statistical models such as graphical probabilistic and TrueSkill Ranking. Firstly, we propose a probabilistic graphical models for modelling racial bias within stop-and-searches and explore varying priors. Secondly using our inference methods, we produce a set of probability distributions for different racial/ethnic groups based on said model and data. Finally, we produce a set of examples of applications of this model, predicting biases not only for stops but also in the reactive response by law officers.