Fairness

Among Broward County defendants who were not arrested again within two years, 44.9% of Black defendants had been labelled medium or high risk, against 23.5% of white defendants. Among those who were arrested again, 47.7% of white defendants had been labelled low risk, against 28.0% of Black defendants. The labels came from COMPAS, a commercial risk score that the Florida county used when deciding whether to hold people before trial, and the numbers from "Machine Bias", the investigation ProPublica published in May 2016 after matching the scores of more than 10,000 defendants with court records for the following two years. The score's mistakes fell in opposite directions on the two groups, and ProPublica called it biased.