Effective Use of Publicly Available Data in the Enforcement of Antidiscrimination Laws

Deserene Worsley and Robert Berman

GIS was installed in the Civil Rights Division to handle the redistricting workload resulting from the 1990 Census. GIS has become the cornerstone support application for the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Since the introduction of GIS for redistricting, the system has quickly become a strategic tool for other division enforcement activities. We have leveraged our investment into other areas of Civil Rights enforcement, specifically housing discrimination, including mortgage lending and property insurance, employment discrimination, and education opportunities discrimination. Our successes have also fostered the establishment of GIS efforts in other areas of the Department of Justice, including the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Criminal Division and environmental equity initiatives. We would like to present and discuss some of our work that was used in enforcement actions against a large bank for mortgage lending discrimination, an insurance company for insurance discrimination, and a rental company for racial steering. The cases exemplify how using GIS technology in conjunction with HMDA, TIGER and other publicly available data, we presented compelling evidence in digestible formats that helped convince potential defendants to resolve their matters voluntarily.




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