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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

#131

Post by ashtonkem »

gabereiser wrote: post #91
ashtonkem wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American police don’t feel institutionally above the law, for all intents and purposes they are. Qualified immunity, a doctrine made up out of whole cloth by the courts, means that cops often can’t be prosecuted or even sued for the most egregious of conduct. And the lengths the courts will go to protect cops are ridiculous, to the point where the courts have upheld the idea that a cop didn’t know that attacking a su…

^ This. Cops aren’t your friends. They can and will use anything you say against you, never for you, in a court of law. I’m not saying we don’t need them. I’m saying they aren’t your friend. Never underestimate the ability of a cop to twist the truth. In court, a cop has the fullest faith of the courts even if they don’t show up. Defending yourself against what a cop says happened is almost impossible. It can be done…

I have never seen a convincing argument that we don’t need cops, courts, and prisons (not that you’re making that argument). Every society seems to have them, and I have a very hard time imagining a society that wouldn’t lock up someone like, say, Anders Breivik.

That being said, it’s pretty obvious that the American justice system is unnecessarily brutal and inefficient. We lock up a huge percentage of our population and have a pretty high recidivism rate compared to our peer nations. Well short of “defunding the police”, we desperately need to rethink the scope and responsibilities of our criminal justice system, and rethink the relationship between police and the citizens of this country.

Re: Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

#132

Post by ruined »

burkaman wrote: post #117
tiahura wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a lovely theory which somehow manages to ignore the industrial-scale, inhuman abuses excused every day. On what planet? I'll admit, I don't do a ton of criminal work, but, I've spent more than my fair share of time sitting through criminal dockets observing cops and criminals and I just don't see it. My good friend won the last significant police brutality case in my metro of 2M people and that was 5 years ago…

It's not because you're afraid of the police, it's because the courts have made it clear that accountability is impossible and cases are pointless. The standard is that you can't convict an officer for constitutional violations unless there was clearly established precedent before the violation occurred. It's an obvious catch 22: to establish precedent you must convict an officer, but you can't convict them unless th…

thanks for this

Re: Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

#133

Post by ashtonkem »

tiahura wrote: post #101
ashtonkem wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American police don’t feel institutionally above the law, for all intents and purposes they are. Qualified immunity, a doctrine made up out of whole cloth by the courts, means that cops often can’t be prosecuted or even sued for the most egregious of conduct. And the lengths the courts will go to protect cops are ridiculous, to the point where the courts have upheld the idea that a cop didn’t know that attacking a su…

Qualified immunity, a doctrine made up out of whole cloth by the courts, means that cops often can’t be prosecuted or even sued for the most egregious of conduct. Qualified immunity has nothing to do with criminal liability, it is a civil affirmative defense and a sound one. Essentially, it provides personal protection for ordinary negligence. When an employee at Pottery Barn drops a plate, we don't deduct it from th…

> When an employee at Pottery Barn drops a plate, we don't deduct it from their paycheck. If we did, no one would work there.

Call me crazy, but I’d like to hold the armed representatives of the state to a higher standard than the minimum wage employees at Pottery Barn. When Pottery Barn employees start legally shooting patrons for dropped plates, we can revisit this.

Re: Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

#134

Post by wtetzner »

tiahura wrote: post #109
_jal wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a lovely theory which somehow manages to ignore the industrial-scale, inhuman abuses excused every day. There are far more examples of egregious abuse excused by the courts by QI than you can stomach looking at; just start searching. Feel free to quibble about all the 'good calls we don't hear about', and then dive in to 'second guessing split-second life or death situations'. We've all been through this discu…

That's a lovely theory which somehow manages to ignore the industrial-scale, inhuman abuses excused every day. On what planet? I'll admit, I don't do a ton of criminal work, but, I've spent more than my fair share of time sitting through criminal dockets observing cops and criminals and I just don't see it. My good friend won the last significant police brutality case in my metro of 2M people and that was 5 years ago…

> But, you won't see any police brutality commercials, and it's not because us ambulance chasers are afraid of the police. It's because the cases are so few and far between that it doesn't make sense to waste resources seeking them out.

Which is because no matter how much police violate our rights, it's basically impossible to win a case against them.

Re: Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

#135

Post by danShumway »

carapace wrote: post #114

Yes, (Duh, wouldn't you?) I've said this before so I apologize in advance for repeating myself. Whether we like it or not ubiquitous surveillance is the new order of the day. You cannot put the technological genie back in the bottle. You can't enforce rules against using it without using it. We're stuck with what I call the "Tyranny of Mrs. Grundy"[1]. The primary result is that we should all work to make a humane ty…

> The primary result is that we should all work to make a humane tyranny (if such a thing is even possible; it sure sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?)

It's not possible, governments need checks and balances, things get bad really fast when they have absolute power.

> Yes, your privacy is a social fiction, but in return, we can stop almost all crime.

No we can't, and (longer conversation) it wouldn't be desirable to in any case. There is a strong school of thought that we don't want perfect enforcement of all laws, at least not ones based around nonviolent crimes.

> Here's a not-entirely-hypothetical thought experiment for you: would you allow your life to be recorded and made public if it would prevent a child from being abducted?

To me, it is hypothetical, because we still had a Capital riot even with increased surveillance. After the riot, it didn't take ubiquitous surveillance to catch those people, they bragged about it in livestreams on social media. We can do better with the capabilities we have.

It seems intuitively correct to say that the NSA surveillance is improving security, but (surprisingly) I don't see strong evidence that the programs are actually helping to catch terrorists. We're giving additional capabilities to people who aren't leveraging or making good use of the capabilities that they already have.

> I'm not a particularly good person (I do my best) and I like my privacy, but I think I would have to take that bargain.

I wouldn't. To me, it sounds like a nonsensical comparison, it's like asking whether or not I'd switch to eating only bugs to stop a kidnapping. I don't believe that it would help, I don't believe the bargain you're proposing makes sense on an individual level. And as a widescale solution to crime on the macro level, the consequences of constant surveillance for everyone are worse than a kidnapping. It's not a good trade.

I do agree with you in one way, which is that regulation of this tech is not a perfect long-term solution. We need to figure out how to enforce regulations, and outside of the regulatory world we need adversarial research into the technology itself as well. Banning facial recognition will not be enough, on its own, to solve the problem -- solving the problem will require a combination of multiple solutions. But it is a problem we should try to solve. Whether that's by normalizing mask wearing, researching how to combat systems like gait detection, making it easier to detect cameras -- we should be thinking about how to give people tools to hide from omnipresent facial recognition.

Re: Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

#136

Post by mindslight »

tiahura wrote: post #109
_jal wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a lovely theory which somehow manages to ignore the industrial-scale, inhuman abuses excused every day. There are far more examples of egregious abuse excused by the courts by QI than you can stomach looking at; just start searching. Feel free to quibble about all the 'good calls we don't hear about', and then dive in to 'second guessing split-second life or death situations'. We've all been through this discu…

That's a lovely theory which somehow manages to ignore the industrial-scale, inhuman abuses excused every day. On what planet? I'll admit, I don't do a ton of criminal work, but, I've spent more than my fair share of time sitting through criminal dockets observing cops and criminals and I just don't see it. My good friend won the last significant police brutality case in my metro of 2M people and that was 5 years ago…

General murders are also few and far between, yet it is in society's interest that murderers be prosecuted. The rarity of a type of crime has nothing to do with whether it should be prosecuted - achieving justice for low-frequency events is literally the entire point of the criminal justice system.

Re: Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

#137

Post by [deleted] »

burkaman wrote: post #117
tiahura wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a lovely theory which somehow manages to ignore the industrial-scale, inhuman abuses excused every day. On what planet? I'll admit, I don't do a ton of criminal work, but, I've spent more than my fair share of time sitting through criminal dockets observing cops and criminals and I just don't see it. My good friend won the last significant police brutality case in my metro of 2M people and that was 5 years ago…

It's not because you're afraid of the police, it's because the courts have made it clear that accountability is impossible and cases are pointless. The standard is that you can't convict an officer for constitutional violations unless there was clearly established precedent before the violation occurred. It's an obvious catch 22: to establish precedent you must convict an officer, but you can't convict them unless th…

[deleted]

Re: Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

#138

Post by LinuxBender »

8note wrote: post #125
LinuxBender wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money drives everything AFAIK. So if laws existed that allowed a state to withhold budget to a county that had cops not following rules, then the county would take interest. If the counties could withhold funding from cities that had bad cops, the mayors would take interest. Or perhaps the laws could permit budget reallocation. I doubt any such laws would ever get passed, but in theory this could help keep people foc…

Cities don't have much ability to handle bad cops though. The police unions are too powerful

Very true, good point.

Re: Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

#139

Post by cwkoss »

zupreme wrote: post #72

At some point governments will have to address the elephant in the room. Across much of the globe, modern police forces have been empowered and emboldened to such a degree that many departments, and their members, feel institutionally above the law. In no other occupation, that I can think of, can so many rules and directives be flouted without losing ones job, as is the case with modern police. Its frankly insulting…

Law enforcement should not just be held to an equal standard as citizens, they should be held to a much higher one.

Re: Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans

#140

Post by cwkoss »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #64
sys_64738 wrote: post #36

A ban is ineffectual without consequences. Criminal prosecution of police chiefs is what's needed, IMO.

There are more types of consequences than just penal ones. For example, I imagine if they are indeed banned, and a case against a defendant is built around the usage of the technology, then that case would get dropped. That is a consequence in of itself as it wasted valuable prosecutorial resources, department resources, etc.

It is obvious that waste of public resources is not an effective deterrent of police lawlessness.

Police leaders should go to prison if they willfully violate the law.

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