Hello?

Hi, Lauren.

Hi.

Hi.

Hi, it's Celeste.

Earlier this week, I called Lauren Kershner.

Earlier this week, I called Lauren Kirshner.

She's an investigative reporter at the markup who loves to dig into official records and pages of data.

A couple of years ago, she took a close look at the algorithm that produces

risk assessments in courtrooms. These risk assessments are used to help judges decide whether to grant

bail or not. They're based on automated background checks, and they produce a score that

predicts how likely it is that an individual will commit a crime in the future.

We actually did a show on this earlier this year.

Lauren found that the risk assessment scores, which are seen as objective, are actually biased

against black individuals.

This year, she discovered that the same technology is being used in a wholly different situation.

We got a tip from an attorney who had heard about a risk score given to tenants

that were being used not only in the private market for landlords,

but also in public housing authorities.

And so I got intrigued to learn about these tenant screening reports.

I wanted to learn where they were being used and which companies were most common.

Two simple questions that turned out to be very difficult to answer, partly because there are so many companies doing background checks, and partly because every company seems to use a different system to produce their reports.

...