Identify a policy that is not usually intended to be a health policy but that you think may have important health implications.
San Francisco passed the Stop Secret Surveillance Ordinance, which limits the use of facial surveillance technology by city departments. Face recognition technology has been shown to have disproportionately high error rates for people of color and overutilization in Black and Latinx neighborhoods. If this technology were incorporated into local surveillance cameras, this will likely exacerbate overpolicing in these neighborhoods and unfairly target these communities. Incarceration greatly affects the health of not only targeted individuals, but also everyone in their community by damaging familial networks and the benefits these individuals bring to their families such as providing income, childcare, and emotional support.
Describe why an evaluation of that policy is informative (e.g., determining effects of the policy, or primarily a test of hypothesized mediators).
Determining whether this policy truly does protect these communities would be important, as other cities, which currently use facial recognition technology, may be convinced to also limit its use.
Specify the outcomes and populations you think most affected or least affected by the policy.
Outcomes: incarceration rates, number of single parent households, income level, welfare enrollment
Populations most affected: Black and Latinx populations, lower SES populations
· Propose a study design to evaluate the policy.
Using cities as an observation unit, cities with restricted facial recognition technology use could be compared to those with free use of this technology. Changes in the outcomes listed above could be obtained before and after facial recognition technology implementation in cities with free use. Cities that had banned/restricted its use could then be used as a control or comparison to see whether these policies have a benefit.
· Describe biggest challenge to implementing and drawing inferences about the impact of the policy on health.
It would be very difficult to actually implement this study, as there are many confounders that either cannot be measured or identified in the first place when attempting to compare cities. Another challenge is the sheer length of time these studies would have to be in order to adequately capture the long-term health effects of these policies.