Venkit Pranav Narayanan, Graziul Christopher, Goodman Miranda Ardith, Kenny Samantha Nicole, Wilson Shomir
Pennslylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA.
University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Proc ACM Hum Comput Interact. 2024 Nov;8(CSCW2). doi: 10.1145/3686921. Epub 2024 Nov 8.
Radios are essential for the operations of modern police departments, and they function as both a collaborative communication technology and a sociotechnical system. However, little prior research has examined their usage or their connections to individual privacy and the role of race in policing, two growing topics of concern in the US. As a case study, we examine the Chicago Police Department's (CPD's) use of broadcast police communications (BPC) to coordinate the activity of law enforcement officers (LEOs) in the city. From a recently assembled archive of 80, 775 hours of BPC associated with CPD operations, we analyze human-generated text transcripts of radio transmissions broadcast 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM on August 10th, 2018 in one majority Black, one majority White, and one majority Hispanic area of the city (24 hours of audio) to explore four research questions: (1) Do BPC reflect reported racial disparities in policing? (2) How and when is gender, race/ethnicity, and age mentioned in BPC? (3) To what extent do BPC include sensitive information, and who is put at most risk by this practice? (4) To what extent can large language models (LLMs) heighten this risk? We explore the vocabulary and speech acts used by police in BPC, comparing mentions of personal characteristics to local demographics, the personal information shared over BPC, and the privacy concerns that it poses. Analysis indicates (a) policing professionals in the city of Chicago exhibit disproportionate attention to Black members of the public regardless of context, (b) sociodemographic characteristics like gender, race/ethnicity, and age are primarily mentioned in BPC about event information, and (c) disproportionate attention introduces disproportionate privacy risks for Black members of the public. This study shows BPC can provide a novel window into disproportionate attention (i.e., via radio communications) by law enforcement officers to specific racial groups, leading to increased privacy vulnerability for those groups, particularly Black males.
无线电对于现代警察部门的运作至关重要，它既是一种协作通信技术，也是一个社会技术系统。然而，此前很少有研究考察过它们的使用情况，以及它们与个人隐私的关联，还有种族在治安管理中的作用，而这两个问题在美国正日益受到关注。作为一个案例研究，我们考察了芝加哥警察局（CPD）使用广播警察通信（BPC）来协调该市执法人员（LEO）的活动。从最近收集的与CPD行动相关的80775小时BPC档案中，我们分析了2018年8月10日上午9点至下午5点在该市一个黑人占多数、一个白人占多数和一个西班牙裔占多数的地区广播的无线电传输的人工生成文本记录（24小时音频），以探讨四个研究问题：（1）BPC是否反映了治安管理中报告的种族差异？（2）BPC中何时以及如何提及性别、种族/族裔和年龄？（3）BPC在多大程度上包含敏感信息，这种做法对谁构成的风险最大？（4）大语言模型（LLM）在多大程度上会加剧这种风险？我们探究了警察在BPC中使用的词汇和言语行为，将个人特征的提及与当地人口统计数据、通过BPC共享的个人信息以及它所带来的隐私问题进行比较。分析表明：（a）芝加哥市的治安管理专业人员无论在何种情况下都对黑人公众表现出不成比例的关注；（b）性别、种族/族裔和年龄等社会人口特征主要在关于事件信息的BPC中被提及；（c）不成比例的关注给黑人公众带来了不成比例的隐私风险。这项研究表明，BPC可以为执法人员对特定种族群体的不成比例关注（即通过无线电通信）提供一个新的窗口，导致这些群体，特别是黑人男性的隐私更容易受到侵犯。
