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A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

theregister.com

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Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#151

Post by CrazyStat »

emodendroket wrote: post #62
CrazyStat wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That it doesn't give the answers the customers (police and prosecutors) want. Which is mostly unrelated to whether or not it's accurate.

I think it’s related. If it is good enough to put someone in jail there shouldn’t be any kind of need for manual overrides at all.

"Good" in what sense? Police and prosecutors don't necessarily care about their evidence being good in the sense of accurate. It just needs to convince a jury.

There is a very, very, very long history of police and prosecutors using bad (in the sense of accuracy) evidence to put people in jail.

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#152

Post by shkkmo »

giantg2 wrote: post #44
stefan_ wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point? These systems invariably turn out to not be any sort of AI at all, but sales people ready to make a call any way their customer (police) wants it made. Later it's presented as AI to a jury. It's basically the same scam as lots of forensics, junk science to get a desired result.

I generally agree, but wouldn't necessarily say a lot of forensics is junk science. The science is generally sound (procedures and theory). Usually it's the prosecutors that present the forensics in a way that misrepresents what the results actually mean. Or lab techs make mistakes or perform misconduct (How to Fix a Drug Scandal on Netflix is interesting).

Not all forensics disciplins are created equal and some of them, such as hair forensics, are definitely junk science.

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#153

Post by jdjd6 »

aeturnum wrote: post #148
phsau wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where in source [1] does it show that it's common for police to make over $450k a year? The 'Avg Total pay & benefits' sorted by title has Chief Information Officer/Registrar of Voters as the entry into that level of remuneration. Police specific above that you only have the Sherrif, which is an elected official. Police pay for the vast majority of roles is significantly below $450k.

That's a good critique! Looking at historical data it seems like "commonly above $300,000" would be more accurate. It's worth saying that listed police salaries are far below these numbers and the officers get there through overtime and other extra payments. Thus the use of 'common' instead of average because you have to look back at what people were actually paid. Edit: I can no longer edit my original post so this…

How are supervisors and elected officials making 300k (after all benefits considered) in an area with a high cost of living equal to "police commonly make above 300k"?

Second, it would be absurd to account for extra income to say they make what you're saying. That's like saying a cashier at walmart works three jobs to make an average of 70k a year, so cashiers at walmart commonly make 70k a year.

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#154

Post by FireBeyond »

jdjd6 wrote: post #133
d4mi3n wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're conflating issues with the institution of policing within the United States with the behavior of individual police officers. Without getting into the politics or philosophy of the comportment or purpose of a police force, there are some things in situations like this that are fact: 1. Police officers (and more importantly, prosecutors) are incentivized to make arrests and have those arrests stick. 2. I…

1. What are those incentives you mention? 2. That applies to everyone, not just police. 3. This is a fallacy due to media portrayal. If you are late to your job what happens? Probably nothing or you get asked not to do it again. The same mistakes you make, police officer will get investigated by internal affairs and punished over.

This is equally a fallacy - "if you are late to your job" "will get investigated by internal affairs". No, they won't. But they will be protected by one of the strongest unions in the country, if not the strongest.

Policing is also a lot less risky a job than is commonly perceived.

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#155

Post by shkkmo »

giantg2 wrote: post #87
emodendroket wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://theintercept.com/2019/05/05/forensic-evidence-aafs-j... https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/jeff...

That doesn't exactly support your claims for most of forensics. If you read/skim the NAS report these articles are based on, you will see that much of the issue is not with the underlying science, but rather in the "interpretation" part. Yes, the odontology seems to be unsupported. But even the fire analysis that you list as an example is said to have a scientific basis like chemistry, but that the interpretation par…

If you are using forensics in a trial, the validity of the "interpretation" part is key to it's use. The reliability of these interpretations has been historically hugely overstated.

Given this history it is absolutely reasonable to reject most forensic evidence unless there actual good science supporting the reliability of expert interpretations.

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#156

Post by [deleted] »

jdjd6 wrote: post #133
d4mi3n wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're conflating issues with the institution of policing within the United States with the behavior of individual police officers. Without getting into the politics or philosophy of the comportment or purpose of a police force, there are some things in situations like this that are fact: 1. Police officers (and more importantly, prosecutors) are incentivized to make arrests and have those arrests stick. 2. I…

1. What are those incentives you mention? 2. That applies to everyone, not just police. 3. This is a fallacy due to media portrayal. If you are late to your job what happens? Probably nothing or you get asked not to do it again. The same mistakes you make, police officer will get investigated by internal affairs and punished over.

[deleted]

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#157

Post by Vaslo »

We have this system in our city. Can’t speak to the accuracy and whether or not it should be admitted evidence. It has in some cases revealed the approximate locations of victims who have been shot where they potentially could have died without the AI heads up as to where they were.

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#158

Post by shkkmo »

dragonwriter wrote: post #127
arp242 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fingerprints are directly-recorded facts. That's not really how it works; false positives exist, especially if you consider that a lot of times you have incomplete or smudged fingerprints and there is actually some amount of subjectivity involved in determining a match. See e.g. [1]: "only two properly designed studies of latent fingerprint analysis had been conducted. These both found the rate of false matches (kn…

> That's not really how it works Yes, it is. > false positives exist Matches (positive or negative) are not the same thing as fingerprints. Fingerprints are directly recorded facts. Matches are matters of interpretation (the fact of a match reported by a particular system is a distinct direct fact from the fingerprint itself, but again the significance is...what expert testimony exists to establish or challenge.)

The "fact" of a fingerprint is useless without matching. Forensics is the process of interpresting and finding matches for facts.

You pedantism is wholey off base here.

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#159

Post by FireBeyond »

xdennis wrote: post #115
scoopertrooper wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that to happen: they'd have to be matched 30 times, the Apple employees would have to mistakenly manually confirm the match 30 times, and the defence would fail to request to see the underlying images that matched the hashes during discovery. It seems... far fetched.

You don't know it's 30 and you don't know it's going to stay so even if it is.

Right, because imagine the spin.

"Our CSAM matching found 29 matches that are either confirmed or strongly suspected in your iCloud drive. But because Apple values your privacy, we are not turning this information over."

No. Expect that number to go to '1', or very close, and very soon. Because as much as this is a PR nightmare for Apple right now, the above scenario is even worse.

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#160

Post by tmpz22 »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #11
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #3

The article says that employees of the AI company (ShotSpotter) manually reviewed and classified the sounds as gunshots: > records showed that ShotSpotter actually initially picked up what sounded like a firework a mile away, and this was later reclassified by ShotSpotter staff to be a gunshot at the intersection where and when Williams was seen on camera. So the AI didn’t even make the call. The staff did, manually.…

It's scary that prosecutors thought that the ShotSpotter evidence is suitable for a court. It's amazing technology that can help police get to a crime scene quickly but is far too easy to spoof or get the wrong answer due to reflections and other sounds etc. Hopefully cases like this will eventually stop the system being used in court.

> It's amazing technology

Serious question, what part of this technology is amazing? Its just sounds trained against audio labeled as gun shots. How is this any different then detecting faces in images or whatever?

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