> He described Reid, who is Black, as a spitting facial image of a man caught on camera in June entering numbers from a stolen credit card at the register of Second Act on Metairie Road.
I'm not surprised unfortunately. I wish more research was done before rolling this out, especially on biases, but lawmakers don't care. Hard to believe this is not intentional, it's perfectly in line with the current system.
> Differences, such as a mole on Reid’s face prompted JPSO to rescind the warrant, said Calogero. He estimated a 40-pound difference between Reid and the purse thief he saw in surveillance footage. The culprit’s “flabby arms” were a clear tell, he said.
Sitting in jail for a week waiting for them to verify his identity based on "flabby arms". Disgusting.
I would claim the bias isn't the problem, the incompetence is. The users of the system have no idea what the system actually is for, let alone how it works.
I think the comment here by Calogero, who appears to be Reid's attorney, is that the flabby arms were something that clearly distinguished Reid from the actual thief, indicative of the 40 pound difference. The implication is that the facial image was the sole similarity, and likely the only thing the police considered when jailing a completely unrelated person from another state for a week.
I can see issuing a BOLO based solely on facial recognition, but nothing beyond that. They issue BOLOs today based on victim descriptions, which I think is no better than a facial recognition.
A lot of these false arrests and detainments can be fixed by compensating the victim for their time and suffering.
It's already unnerving that you can be jailed for a week at any time without being convicted of anything, but it may also justified (what if you are guilty? What if the crime implies you are dangerous?)
But the fact you can be jailed for a week at any time, and only get a half-heared apology, is plain unfair. The state has the money, and I don't care whether it comes out of police budget (which would lower arrests as a side-effect) or just taxpayers.
> A Baton Rouge Police Department detective then adopted JPSO’s identification of Reid to secure an arrest warrant…
Who's the judge signing warrants on nothing but a cop's say-so? How's that probable cause? But I guess we know most judges just sign whatever the cops put in front of them.
Apparently the judge is Judge Eboni Rose. They oughta be ashamed. That's the only consequence they'll get, so.
The people who are working on this type of tech need to take a hard look at what they’re doing and think about whether they’re comfortable making our society worse.
It wouldn’t be hard to convince yourself that Big Brother is a great thing. If only the facial recognition was correct, it would be a criminal in jail and not an innocent man.
I'd be such a person, and I'd absolutely argue the tech even though admitting that it's fallible and makes mistakes. It's the gooey, grey, and fallible humans and justice system around the tech that needs improving. The sum of all the parts together (facial recognition tech and other things + human review + decent human beings) can be most certainly leaps and bounds more useful than those things in isolation and certainly better than if we didn't have such tech at our disposal.
It’s a respectable position. From my time in China, many people felt this way. The streets feel and are extremely safe. Surveillance makes low-level crime hard to get away with. It genuinely raised serious questions for me. What good is privacy if I’m getting stabbed in private?
What I can’t get my head around is the second-order effects that this has. With more surveillance, it shifts power from the watched to the watchers. The squishy parts, who may have their own personal motivations. I’m not entirely sure democracy can survive such a severe imbalance.
Maybe the answer is to replace democracy with a computer.
The US is slowly moving towards adopting the same ubiquitous surveillance that we used to pride ourselves of not needing to worry about in this country. In both the public and private sector, systems that monitor people are going to make life a living hell if nothing is done about it.
There is currently no federal law preventing the deployment of a privatized social credit score to be passed around in the same way financial credit scores are today. And there is every incentive to do so. Using present-day technologies, stores could quickly refuse customers who have been blacklisted, and this list won’t require any conviction or pesky due process whatsoever. It doesn’t even have to be that accurate: a list that’s right 90% of the time is rejecting undesired patrons 9 times out of 10.
Some places can and will ban law enforcement from using facial recognition, but that’s hardly enough. Many places have private security which will not be bound by those rules. And most of the infrastructure we use and treat as “public” really isn’t. Credit card processors are private. Transportation is almost all private. ISPs and cell phone carriers are private. Grocery stores are private. A blacklist doesn’t even need to ban people, raising the prices and downgrading service for “troublesome” customers is enough.
If I were marketing such a product, I would focus on the positives: you can also quickly identify big spenders based on prior shopping (including at other stores). Stores will give priority customer service to these people and maybe even other perks.
I should also note that it is immaterial that facial recognition currently has major issues. There’s no question that bad ubiquitous surveillance is bad, in the same way that a diet of radioactive cheeseburgers is bad: removing the radioactivity doesn’t solve the problem. Arguments relying on the accuracy of current capabilities are always at risk of being outdated. I’m not as focused on “what is inaccurate” but rather “what if facial recognition is 100% accurate”.
Crystal ball time: stable diffusion sketch artists will be with us soon. They’ll gave us, to borrow the phrase, spitting image renders of criminals based on witness testimony.
But I bet Chat GPT dispatchers make it to the front lines first. Helping direct first responders while talking people through emergency situations.
"NOPD will request use of software licensed by the Louisiana State Analytical and Fusion Exchange, a hub for data and tech used by law enforcement agencies. To find matches and identify possible crime suspects in investigations, the NOPD can now request that the Fusion Exchange use its facial recognition software to perform searches of its database, which includes photos from criminal mugshots and of people who have been fingerprinted or passed through security clearances such as those at airports.
...
Idemia makes the facial recognition software licensed by the state that NOPD will access, according to New Orleans city council staff. Headquartered in France, Idemia provides algorithmic systems that use biometric data representing fingerprints, irises, faces and tattoos for identification services used by law enforcement and government ID programs such as India’s immense Aadhaar program."
Also:
"During Thursday’s meeting, Marvin Arnold, a representative of New Orleans anti-surveillance tech advocacy group Eye on Surveillance, gave a presentation claiming that facial recognition is biased and racist.
...
During the meeting, (New Orleans city council member Freddie King III, who voted in support of the ordinance change,) said the contention that using facial recognition is racist was a faulty one because he, the city’s police chief and some people supporting use of the technology by law enforcement are Black."
"Some cities and states have put clamps in recent years on police use of facial recognition. But several, including New Orleans, have since backed off amid a rise in crime."
People are being sold technology they're somehow convinced to 'believe in'. Caveat emptor for consumers, but that can't be good enough for people who can ruin other people's lives.
I'm not surprised unfortunately. I wish more research was done before rolling this out, especially on biases, but lawmakers don't care. Hard to believe this is not intentional, it's perfectly in line with the current system.
> Differences, such as a mole on Reid’s face prompted JPSO to rescind the warrant, said Calogero. He estimated a 40-pound difference between Reid and the purse thief he saw in surveillance footage. The culprit’s “flabby arms” were a clear tell, he said.
Sitting in jail for a week waiting for them to verify his identity based on "flabby arms". Disgusting.