The Brown administration says the system will enable police management and city policymakers to examine, almost in real time, the effectiveness of community policing training, new equipment such as nonlethal weapons and new policies.
The contract was approved 6-3 on the condition that a cancellation policy has been built in to ensure that the city will be "held harmless" if federal aid it  expects does not materialize and the city is unable to meet this financial obligation.
 
The city is anticipating $65 million in federal pandemic assistance in a proposal that so far has stalled in Washington.
Voting no on the contract were Lovejoy Council Member Bryan J. Bollman, Fillmore's Mitchell P. Nowakowski and University's Rasheed N.C. Wyatt. They  were uncomfortable approving the contract without knowing if or how much of the federal aid will be realized.
 
“I still feel there’s a chance we might only get a portion of that funding we are requesting, which could leave us with difficult decisions in the future,” Bollman said.

If Buffalo gets the federal aid to implement the system, it would work in a manner similar to New York State’s analyses of Covid-19 data, said Robert Mayer, the city's director of policy, during a recent Council meeting. 

[...]

But some are concerned about data transparency, the potential for "predictive policing" and a racially disparate impact.
“Using data to make real-time decisions sounds a lot like a shift that we’ve seen in other parts of the state, including New York (City), where they’ve used software systems … to algorithmically predict where crime might happen,” said attorney J. Miles Gresham, a policy fellow at Partnership for the Public Good and a member of Free the People WNY and the Minority Bar Association of WNY’s task force on criminal justice reform. "This has produced, I think unintentionally, a racially disparate impact.”

But Mayer said there is a difference between analysis and predictive policing, and that the two should not be confused.“

Predictive analysis is really about how you alter those data points that are going to appear in the evaluation to improve results. (For instance) if it’s going to be more training time on a particular device or tool. Is it going to be a pattern that develops as far as when specialized units like the Behavioral Health Team are deployed? Those are the types of things that predictive analyses show and have nothing to do with predictive policing,” Mayer said.

The results of the data will be made public, just as with the state Health Department's Covid-19 information, but the analyses of the data is an internal decision-making process, Mayer said.
 

Read the full article on the Buffalo News website here.