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Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

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Re: Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

#41

Post by rtkwe »

pepperonipizza wrote: post #34
prussian wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So instead we should increase the risk of death and injury instead of safely picking people up once things deescalate? I don't think that's lazy by any measure.

If we let these events continue until they die down, wouldn't that create more of a risk that a death happens than the police intervening to try to stop it?

It's a tough decision to make, police getting involved to break up crowds often escalates the violence from that crowd, look at all the protests here in the US that were mostly peaceful and get escalated by police response. Now there's a new thing to be mad about and it's unlikely to go away because the police are hard to disengage once they decide they should.

Re: Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

#42

Post by throwaway0a5e »

roenxi wrote: post #39
ausbah wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is it literally not the job of the police to stop events like this? of course their safety needs to be considered to a degree, but any perceived threat isn't a reason for them to just act as a glorified clean up crew

Police are here to deal with a few deviants here and there who act up. They aren't really meant to be a tool to break up mass political action.

Sure, in an ideal world.

But every big city police department is at decently trained and equipped for dealing with riots at our expense.

So if we're gonna pay for that stupidity we may as well get the benefit of it.

Re: Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

#44

Post by throwaway0a5e »

IAmAtWork wrote: post #3

Let me be controversial for a second but this is not such a big deal. because they were always doing it only slower and manually. Its same with deepfakes. I am not happy or supporting either but with rise in computational power some things are unavoidable. Police always used photo id databases in manhunts. And deepfakes existed in Victorian era. We need to make sure that auditing agencies monitoring the government an…

>because they were always doing it only slower and manually.

That's exactly the difference. Because it was laborious and therefore expensive the techniques used to be reserved for when they were actually warranted. Now because it's cheap and easy those techniques get used for petty crimes.

Re: Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

#45

Post by bluntfang »

ngold wrote: post #28
mnd999 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We saw the same in London after the 2012 riots. Instead of stopping the rioting and looting the police let it go on and then took all the cctv and arrested the perpetrators after the event. It’s lazy policing, hundreds of shops got damaged and looted simply because for whatever reason the police wouldn’t do what people want them to do. Stop people committing crime at the time.

This. Lazy policing is everything that is wrong. Fire everyone and have a drone fly overhead that takes a picture a minute if you don't care about human privacy.

i pick lazy over dishonest any day of the week.

Re: Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

#46

Post by netizen-9748 »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #40

When it comes to distributed/local technologies, does a ban really accomplish anything? I'm dubious that facial recognition technology will disappear because some random governments passed laws against it. Especially because it's nearly impossible to punish when police can just use parallel construction. "We received an anonymous tip and followed it up." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction The solutio…

Parallel construction sounds an awful lot like lying

Re: Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

#47

Post by bsenftner »

Ensorceled wrote: post #30
Bostonian wrote: post #23

When people unlawfully break into a building, why the heck shouldn't facial recognition be used to identify them? We are not talking about using cameras on the street to give people jaywalking tickets. If you owned a business that was looted, and you had video of the looters, wouldn't you want them caught?

Facial recognition has a disturbing habit of "catching" the wrong people. "We have video of a crime, arrest these people", is how facial recognition is advertised (and you bought the story). But it keeps being used as "there is a 87% chance that this person walking down the street in Atlanta is the person who robbed a liquor store in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in 2006, go arrest that guy"

Facial recognition needs to be paired with a screening for Racial Blindness with any operator of FR software. FR software provides a filtering, given many faces, here are the best matches. This is where the FR software operator is critical because it is then their task to pick the best match. The final step in FR is always a human making the selection, primarily due to a lack of image quality the "best match" cannot be assured to be the correct match, and even then the correct person may not even be in the FR database. This is the type of understanding and analysis that needs to be present in an FR software operator, but as far as I can tell this area is completely ignored by both the producers of FR and the customers of FR. Disclosure: I am the lead developer of a global leading FR solution.

Re: Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

#48

Post by mytailorisrich »

Ensorceled wrote: post #30
Bostonian wrote: post #23

When people unlawfully break into a building, why the heck shouldn't facial recognition be used to identify them? We are not talking about using cameras on the street to give people jaywalking tickets. If you owned a business that was looted, and you had video of the looters, wouldn't you want them caught?

Facial recognition has a disturbing habit of "catching" the wrong people. "We have video of a crime, arrest these people", is how facial recognition is advertised (and you bought the story). But it keeps being used as "there is a 87% chance that this person walking down the street in Atlanta is the person who robbed a liquor store in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in 2006, go arrest that guy"

That's a problem with police procedures and training of those who use facial recognition, not facial recognition per se.

Re: Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

#49

Post by throwaway0a5e »

Bostonian wrote: post #23

When people unlawfully break into a building, why the heck shouldn't facial recognition be used to identify them? We are not talking about using cameras on the street to give people jaywalking tickets. If you owned a business that was looted, and you had video of the looters, wouldn't you want them caught?

>When people unlawfully break into a building, why the heck shouldn't facial recognition be used to identify them?

Because trespass by itself is not a big enough crime to handle in that manner. Trespass is a crime that exists solely as a means to prosecute people for other not criminal enough to violate the letter of the law type behavior. There need to be other factors to make it worth tracking people down (theft, vandalism, stalking, etc). A pure trespass charge is not worth it. By all means prosecute the people who smashed stuff but in this day and age you don't need to go after everyone in order to do that.

>We are not talking about using cameras on the street to give people jaywalking tickets.

Do you know what the MA state police use their ALPRs for since we don't really have a car theft problem big enough to warrant running plates all the time? They park on a main road by an intersection and automate the sending of expired inspection sticker tickets. Government programs are under immense pressure to justify their budget. This is why you have swat teams responding to BS, gotta use it or lose it. Dragnet crap inevitably gets used on petty crimes in order to justify it. All the incentives point that way so that's what you get.

>If you owned a business that was looted, and you had video of the looters, wouldn't you want them caught?

Looters, not trespassers.

> We are not talking about using cameras on the street to give people jaywalking tickets.

But that is exactly where it winds up leading. But because it's not politically popular to prosecute jaywalking and rich people jaywalk they do things like prosecute all the weed dealers and backyard mechanics for not obtaining all the proper licensing and paying proper taxes.

Also as an aside I find your username very fitting.

I've lived in half a dozen states and only the DMV areas gives the Boston area a run for its money when it comes to approval of doing anything to enforce the law paired with blindness to downsides of enforcing the law to the letter. (Yes I am aware this is a sweeping generalization but I think it's an accurate enough one that I don't feel bad about making it.) Though I will admit that I have not lived in the wealthy suburbs of NYC and I have my suspicions about them.

Re: Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

#50

Post by Thiez »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #31
prussian wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So instead we should increase the risk of death and injury instead of safely picking people up once things deescalate? I don't think that's lazy by any measure.

If i report someome trying to kill me, i'd very much prefer the police to act immediately

Don't worry sir, we'll dispatch a camera drone immediately. Please keep within a well-lit area. With video evidence the perp will almost certainly be convicted.
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