Algorithms intersect with the daily lives of New
Yorkers in countless ways,
matching students with schools,
assessing teacher performance,
rooting out Medicaid fraud, and
helping building inspectors manage their workloads. Vacca first became interested in the issue in the context of policing; he felt that his local precinct in the Bronx couldn’t adequately explain the “criteria and formula” behind its staffing decisions. “That always annoyed me, and I felt that I was not being given a lot of the answers I wanted,” Vacca told me, earlier this month. Starting in May, he and a couple of enterprising young staffers, Zachary Hecht and Malaika Jabali, took a stab at addressing the problem. They wrote a draft bill of about a hundred words, which became the focus of the October hearing. A tiny, intriguing, ambitious thing, it proposed that whenever a city agency wished to use an automated system to apportion policing, penalties, or services, the agency would be required to make the source code—the system’s inner workings—available to the public. It would also be required to simulate the algorithm’s real-world performance using data submitted by New Yorkers.
