Is this the full list of US cities that have bought or considered Predpol's predictive policing services?

Predpol (previoulsy) is a "predictive policing" company that sells police forces predictive analytics tools that take in police data about crimes and arrests and spits out guesses about where the police should go to find future crimes.

Predpol has drawn sharp criticism for algorithmic discrimination, in which data from racist policing practices are laundered through an algorithm that gives them the veneer of empirical impartiality: feeding faulty data to a predictive algorithm produces faulty analysis. "Garbage in, garbage out" is an iron law of computing that has not been repealed by machine learning techniques.

Even as Predpol and its competitors, like Palantir (previously) have expanded their operations, concerned citizens have successfully pushed for local laws requiring cities to engage in public consultation before procuring services that feed private corporations policing and surveillance data in order to direct policing operations. However, in most markets, Predpol and its competitors operate in obscurity. The cop who stopped you this week (or who didn't come to your neighborhood at all) might have been acting on orders from an AI oracle provided by Predpol to your local police, whose tax-funded revenues are a close-kept secret.

An anonymous security researcher recently contacted me with what may be a list of Predpol's customers. This researcher had seen that Predpol assigns easy-to-guess subdomains to each Predpol customer, in the form of CITYNAME.predpol.com, for example, baltimore.predpol.com.

This researcher wrote a script that combined the name of every US city and town with ".predpol.com" and checked to see whether this domain existed. Read the rest