My name is Ella Windlan and I am a second (almost third) year student at Florida State Studying International Affairs and Editing Writing, & Media with a minor in Criminology. I am looking forward to sharing my journey as I complete the IDEA Grant program over this upcoming Summer Semester. I am so beyond excited to begin my project exploring the human rights implications of predive, algorithmic, law enforcement technologies under the guidance of my amazing research mentor, Dr. Trinyan Mariano!
I first became interested in academic research through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) which I completed during my freshman year. Through this program, I served as a research assistant on The Linked Women Pedagogues Project, an archival research project working to increase the representation of the intellectual influence of early 20th-century women in online authorial and biographical databases. This was my first introduction to research as a means of social justice, and doing the important work of rectifying racist and sexist practices of representation.
Expanding on this experience, I currently work as a research intern with FSU’s Center on Better Health and Life for Underserved Populations (BHL), a research-based organization that addresses health disparities through community-based participatory research and programming. Through this role, I am in the process of conducting a public health research project, which has allowed me to learn the best social science research practices, gain key research certifications, and acquire key knowledge on data collection and interpretation that I will apply to this research project.
Aside from my involvement in Undergraduate Research, throughout my time at Florida State, I have had the privilege of being a part of many incredible organizations including the Community Ambassadors program through the Center of Leadership and Service, the 75th and 76th Student Senates where I served as the Chair of the Internal Affairs Committee, and the Presidential Scholars program where I serve on the Executive and Education and Unity Boards.
In the coming weeks, I will begin to conduct a qualitative research project to determine if data-driven, predictive policing practices present potential human and civil rights violations. The controversy surrounding these policing programs, which attempt to predict future crime and/or criminals based on geographic factors, individual criminal records, and other “impartial” variables, has grown as advancements in predictive technology and AI continue to outpace the legislation that regulates their usage. Police departments claim the technology has the potential to reduce crime and save resources by making evidence-based predictions about where and by whom certain crimes will be committed and subsequently concentrating police efforts on those areas and/or people.
However, in recent years, an increasing number of scholars, policymakers, and community activists have likened the use of this technology to stop-and-frisk policing, asserting that the neutral front of algorithmic technology belies a myriad of ways in which it embeds discriminatory stereotypes and assumptions that replicate historic biases in policing and produce discriminatory outcomes. My project will evaluate the validity of these claims through a meta-analysis of predictive policing programs across the country, which will be used to inform a case study on Pasco County, Florida, (my hometown) whose controversial predictive policing program was recently discontinued.
Although many of the injustices I have witnessed throughout my life have informed my passion for the advancement of human rights, the disparities I saw throughout my community in 2020 deeply informed my collegiate mission to be an agent of positive social change. It is this mission of mine that sparked my interest in investigating predictive policing practices and the repercussions such surveillance could have on people around the country. I was led to the issue of predictive and data-driven policing specifically because of the outcry in my hometown community following the publication of a Tampa Bay Times investigative journalism piece published in 2020 that detailed the way this technology was negatively impacting families and individuals in my hometown. In Dr. Mariano’s Literature of Human Rights course, which I took in the Fall of 2022, I wrote an extensive White Paper on the subject which inspired me to continue exploring the issue and raising awareness through academia. This led me to present an early formulation of my project at the 2023 Florida Undergraduate Research Conference and the Association of Computers and the Humanities Summer 2023 Conference, where I was taken aback by the number of people who had not heard about this development in policing technologies.
Read more about the predictive policing program in Pasco County here: https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/police-pasco-sheriff-targeted/intelligence-led-policing/
Based on what I learned through these processes, I believe data-driven policing has the potential to result in a plethora of human and civil rights violations, but more robust research into this technology and its impact around the country is needed to substantiate my preliminary findings. It is for this reason that I pursued the IDEA grant. I hope I can use my research to raise awareness surrounding issues of technology and surveillance in policing to inspire more regulatory legislation as needed.
Conducting this project is also deeply intertwined with my academic and professional goals, as I hope to implement this research into my honors in the major project, which will explore predictive policing and law enforcement surveillance as a human rights issue. I also plan on continuing to pursue research guided by social justice principles as a career, hopefully receiving a Ph.D. in Rhetoric or the social sciences and continuing to embody my goal of creating positive social change. I cannot wait to get started and I am so incredibly grateful for all the people who have made this possible for me!
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