No, I have repeatedly and explicitly stated that protected classes like race should not be used as inputs into any sort of model. The notion that I have said th

No, I have repeatedly and explicitly stated that protected classes like race should not be used as inputs into any sort of model. The notion that I have said that we should use race as an input to a model is completely false. What I am saying is that pointing to disparities in the outcome of these models to claim that the models are biased is not, on it's own, a reasonable conclusion. As you point out, people in Joshua Tree and South LA have higher rates of crime than average. So if our model flags people from these areas as high risk more frequently than other places, is our algorithm biased? If we deliberately make the model to produce uniform results across different locations because an engineer feels that it's problematic to have a model that produces different results between different geographic cohorts, then have we mitigated bias? No, that engineer intentionally introduced our own bias to make the model adhere to his or her worldview.