{"id":2177,"date":"2020-10-21T12:28:36","date_gmt":"2020-10-21T16:28:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/inclusionexclusion\/?p=2177"},"modified":"2020-10-21T12:28:36","modified_gmt":"2020-10-21T16:28:36","slug":"jmc-openletter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/inclusionexclusion\/2020\/10\/21\/jmc-openletter\/","title":{"rendered":"Towards a Mathematics Beyond Police and Prisons"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest post by The Just Mathematics Collective<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n

The October 2020 issue of the <\/span>Notices of the American Mathematical Society<\/span><\/i> contained an open letter calling on the mathematics community to boycott collaborations with police and demanding, in particular, that we stop providing law enforcement with the mathematical technology they increasingly rely upon to terrorize Black and brown poor and working class people. The letter mentions the deeply racist feedback loops that predictive policing creates, and points out that predictive algorithms grant the police an unearned veneer of scientific legitimacy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Alongside the open letter, the AMS published three other letters: one by Ingrid Daubechies, Ezra Miller, and Cynthia Rudin; another by Daniel Krashen, who was also given space to write a separate article expounding on his opinion; and the third by Sol Garfunkel. The arguments in these letters vary, but all oppose the boycott in spirit.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We, the Just Mathematics Collective (JMC), are a collective of mathematicians formed during the 2020 Black Lives Matter rebellion. Our goal is to shift the mathematics community towards justice via anti-racism, anti-militarism, and solidarity with the Global South. We acknowledge the role that mathematics plays in sustaining injustice, and the potential it has for creating a freer world built on mutual care and collaboration.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

As such, the JMC wholeheartedly supports the boycott and the purpose of this statement is to respond to these three letters and to Daniel Krashen\u2019s article. [<\/span>1]<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

There are JMC members who helped co author the \u201cboycott letter\u201d, but there is no containment in either direction. The boycott letter predates the JMC and the JMC takes specific political stances that are not articulated in the boycott letter, and not necessarily shared by the signatories of the boycott letter. As we will explain, we support the call for a boycott for reasons that go beyond the original letter\u2019s arguments.<\/span><\/p>\n

While we agree with the claims made in the call for a boycott regarding the racist feedback loops inherent to predictive policing algorithms, our opposition to collaboration with police does not rely on problems with specific algorithms and instead rests on a more fundamental contention:<\/span><\/p>\n

The role of the police in US society is to protect racial capitalism with coercion and violence.\u00a0 Thus, even if it was possible to create a predictive policing algorithm 100% free of racial bias, providing such an algorithm to the police would constitute an act of oppression.<\/b><\/p>\n

Therefore, we will not rehash arguments summarized by the authors of the boycott letter about the specific effects of these algorithms.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We emphasise that our position is political, as is any position on the matter of collaboration with police, whether or not that is made explicit. The JMC arrived at our stance <\/span>not <\/span><\/i>by finding a mathematical error in the literature on predictive policing algorithms. Our position rests in the political tradition of <\/span>abolition<\/span><\/i> and an understanding of the historical and present role of the police in maintaining unjust and racist structures of political and economic power.<\/span><\/p>\n

In his article, Krashen claims that \u201cpolice patrolling will not simply end.\u201d\u00a0 With these few short words, Krashen dismisses decades of political organizing and theorizing by workers, prisoners, and Black feminist thinkers who have dedicated their lives to building a world in which police patrolling <\/span>will indeed end<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 No one expects this will happen \u201csimply\u201d, but a major obstruction to its happening at all is an unimaginative collective assumption that it is impossible.<\/span><\/p>\n

All three of the letters (as well as Krashen\u2019s article) are rife with such assumptions — for instance, that the status quo of throwing people in cages as a means of addressing social problems is a necessary aspect of human society. Crucially, the authors do not explicitly acknowledge that <\/span>these are deeply political assumptions<\/span><\/i>, and instead obscure their political assumptions with claims to scientific objectivity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Unlike those advancing these disingenuous arguments, the JMC freely admits our subjectivity — what we state here are our political opinions and we do not pretend otherwise. We see a tendency in the mathematics community to characterise as \u201crationality\u201d the practice of ignoring lived realities, historical facts, and moral and political questions; unlike some of our colleagues, we will not allude to our \u201cobjective analyses\u201d and \u201clogical insights\u201d when making our arguments. Our stance derives from being humans observing actual social and material conditions; from seeing the impacts of prisons and police on our communities, friends, and family; and from engaging in the basic human practice of envisioning a more humane and just world.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To help frame what follows, we list below some historical facts and political opinions that undergird our position.<\/span><\/p>\n