This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
14 out of 15 requests were of black people. Facial recognition is notoriously bad with darker skin tones.
Racial Discrimination in Face Recognition Technology https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discrimination-in-face-recognition-technology/
Yeah, this same exact story keeps coming up for years now just with different names. Why anyone would think that both the ineffectiveness and racial bias in these systems either wouldn’t exist or will somehow go away eventually is beyond me. Just expensive and ineffective mass surveillance for the sake of it…
Actually, all 15 were of black people. 14 were of black men, one was a black woman.
Zero arrests as well.
Minor correction.
15 out of 15 requests were of black people. 14 of those requests were black men and 1 was a black woman.
Thank you for your service!
Who remembers the HP computer that was unable to identify black people? One of my favorite "oooph, that's not a good look" tech fails of all time. At least the people in that video were having a good laugh about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM
Holy hell, that was 13 years ago.
Yeah. Basicly anything with a lower contrast, with shadows and backgrounds. And because shadows are dark, they have a lower contrast with other dark things.
Discrimination is the wrong word. Technology has no morals or sense of justice. It is bias in the data that developers should have accounted for.
It's totally accurate though. It's like the definition of systemic racism really. Think about housing or financial policy that disproportionately fails for minorities. They aren't some Klan manifesto. Instead they just include banal qualifications and exemptions that end up at the same result.
This seems shortsighted. You are basically asking people to police their own biases. That's a tall ask for something no one can claim immunity from.
It can be an imported bias/descrimination. I still think that words fair.
Do you have a more accurate word?
I already said it: bias. It's a common problem with LLMs and other machine learning models that model engineers need to watch out for.
Ask the people who create the data sets that machine learning models train on how they feel about racism and get back to us
Huh. It's almost like cops are constantly wasting money on bullshit.
only if it’s ours, of course
The terrifying part to me is that cops across the nation have a long history of seeing that the tech they want to use is unreliable and based on junky science, but they still push it through anyway. Aren't police dogs about as reliable as a coin-flip when their handlers aren't nipping at their neck to get them to jump at anything? They don't care if it's right as long as they can use it to justify their behavior, so they make it policy.
Only the drug dogs are ineffective. Bloodhounds and tracking dogs have been a staple of hunting down people, and German retrievers can take a man down effectively as well.
When they are trained with incentives for finding something, instead of incentives to be correct, then they will find something. Same is true for man or beast.
A lot if forensic "science" is utter bunk. Yet it continues to be used. Having a fair and equitable system was never the point.
lots of nice biometric additions to the database tho, right? 😠
I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark that all the false positives were black men.
For the same reason that my Echo dot (aka Spotify Bitch) will ignore my wife but cheerfully respond to my mumbled requests from three rooms away. If you make all this shit in Silicon Valley, it will work best for people of a similar demographic to those that work there.
I mean, law enforcement occasionally uses polygraph tests in their investigations even though that type of "evidence" isn't admissible in court and, to be honest, what kind of scientific credibility does a piece of technology like a polygraph even have? They'll use whatever they can get their hands on even if it's questionable. Some police forces probably even have a psychic consultant or something. It scares me.
They'll use it especially if it's questionable, like handwriting analysis, because the goal is arrests not correct arrests. Trumped up, flimsy, circumstantial "evidence" is the best kind when you don't actually want to do your job.
Yeah, it goes along with the low standards that define probable cause. Policing, just like a lot of professions, is subject to bean counting when bean counting is not appropriate. Voters love to see statistics that flaunt "more arrests." Funny how people love numbers without really understanding what the numbers mean.
So rolling it out state- or nationwide next?
The current state of policing doesn't deserve to have access to this kinda shit. Hopefully it never will tbh.
People may see this as a "see, AI isn't that good". We all need to rail against these kinds of programs to the point they are made illegal. Because there are examples around the world of being able to track people with facial recognition (and even by the way someone walks with their face entirely covered 0_0)
I see this as the new Orleans police dep hired a inept contractor (or did an inept job in house).
Around the world, we must fight against all inappropriate data harvesting.
With all the laws trying to put women into basically servitude I'm definitely on team rail against. There are a lot of types of "criminals" that need to be able to get away from law enforcement these days unfortunately. Honestly I'd prefer they just keep being inept for now lol
So, why not just write-off the technology as unreliable and move on? Even with the atrocious false positive rate, you would have still expected more than 15 hits in 9 months. This tech has got to be expensive and even the potential ROI on this, if it ever works at all, is very not worth it.
NOPD failing its citizen, one bad idea at a time
well, good on them for not arresting false positives at least
When I walk into the building I work at there is a disclaimer that they are using facial recognition. I don't know if this is reality or a scare tactic, but based on the industry I would assume they're just using it for free AI training
if you think it's good that cops have more tech you are the dumbest fucking hog imaginable
Surprise surprise!
Tbf, NOPD don't arrest many people anyway. There's a massive cop shortage, only 944 officers for a city of 364,000 with skyrocketing crime rates. Moreover, they've been operating under a consent decree by the DOJ since 2012. They're overworked, underpaid and under the thumb of the feds so in response they simply don't do shit.
The cops in my city were under a DOJ consent decree for like 20 years, and it didn't make them any less effective. They're actually worse now, because they actively don't give a fuck.
