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Towards a Mathematics Beyond Police and Prisons |

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The October 2020 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society 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. 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. We, the Just Mathematics Collective (JMC), are a collective of mathematicians formed during the 2020 Black

Towards a Mathematics Beyond Police and Prisons | Skip to content Home About the Editors About this Blog AMS.org ← Hopes for a new Editor-in-Chief Building Gender and Sexuality Allyship in the Mathematics Community → Towards a Mathematics Beyond Police and Prisons Posted on October 21, 2020 by Piper Guest post by The Just Mathematics Collective The October 2020 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society contained an open letter calling on the mathematics community to boycott collaborations with police and demanding, in particular, that we stop providing law enforcement

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