[HN Gopher] Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans
___________________________________________________________________
Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans
Author : atg_abhishek
Score : 281 points
Date : 2021-01-29 04:10 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (themarkup.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (themarkup.org)
| [deleted]
| cwkoss wrote:
| I wonder if the Facial Recognition software or the police humans
| have a higher racial bias?
| apples_oranges wrote:
| For the sake of our kids.. I have no idea how we will avoid a
| complete surveillance state in the future. Tracking devices in
| every pocket. And algorithms that can turn every camera into a
| tracking device.
| ben_w wrote:
| We can't avoid that any more than the government can avoid
| criminals having unbreakable encryption.
|
| All we can do is try to make a society where that doesn't
| matter.
|
| IMO such a society is as anarchic as possible, though "as
| possible" is still well short of the level in, say, The
| Culture; the exact level is dynamic and tech-dependent.
| krspykrm wrote:
| > We can't avoid that any more than the government can avoid
| criminals having unbreakable encryption.
|
| I mean, we can; we just don't. It's not like there's
| something baked into the laws of math that says your society
| is required to be a surveillance state (unlike encryption,
| where the laws of math do say this is always possible).
|
| It is absolutely within the realm of technological
| possibility to build a society with largely decentralized
| infrastructure that doesn't constantly phone home to report
| on you to the Great Eye. We don't live in that world because
| normal people are kinda retarded. In the words of the creator
| of the Great Eye itself: "They trust me. Dumb fucks."
| ben_w wrote:
| The reason I say it is unavoidable is not laws of nature,
| it is the ease with which it can be done with current
| technology, and the advantages that our current technology
| brings to societies which do not reject it.
|
| Indeed we could, as you say, construct societies without
| that capacity -- Amish, etc. already do so -- but such a
| society is outcompeted by every society which embraces
| tech, and any society with tech at the level of the Stasi
| (i.e. both old _and_ the wrong side of the Iron Curtain)
| can surveil whoever it wants whenever it wants.
|
| Now? Now it doesn't matter if you decentralised all the
| infrastructure, the tech is too cheap to _avoid_ total
| surveillance.
|
| Now, laser mics are school projects, and the hardware cost
| for pointing one at each and every window in London 24/7 is
| significantly lower than the annual cost of the
| Metropolitan Police Service in the same city.
|
| Now, your WiFi can be converted into a wall-penetrating
| radar, do pose detection, heart rate and breathing
| detection.
|
| Now, my wristwatch knows when I walk past the charging
| station to turn on its screen and remind me of its
| existence. I don't even know _how_ it knows when I'm
| walking past.
|
| Now, I have an IR camera that can see through some opaque-
| to-visible-light materials for no good reason and at
| pocket-money prices.
|
| "Centralised" has its problems, but getting rid of
| centralisation isn't enough.
| switch007 wrote:
| What do you think defines a "complete" surveillance state? I.e.
| what would be different from now.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Compare surveillance in US and China. Both have a lot of it,
| but one has orders of magnitude more of it. Also China is
| more open about it. In US there's attempts to be sneaky about
| it, not so in China, though that's probably just the
| dictatorial aspect.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| The CCP already has that:
|
| - QR code required to board public transit
|
| - facial surveillance when you use a traffic light which
| monitors your appearance and expression
|
| - moving towards digital-only currency to track purchases.
| lb1lf wrote:
| Not OP, but presumably advances in machine learning which
| will make it simpler to identify patterns and gleam useful,
| actionable information from the vast troves of data being
| collected.
|
| Today, it is my impression that much data is only used to
| reconstruct events after the fact, rather than gaining a
| priori knowledge to prevent an incident in the first place.
|
| (And, to make it clear - I am not suggesting 'progress' as
| outlined above is desirable...)
| lm28469 wrote:
| Not OP but I believe most of the surveillance derives from
| third parties. The government doesn't directly control or
| monitor most of the surveillance tools (google, telecoms,
| geoloc, &c.), or at least not in most advanced countries. But
| it's getting easier and easier for them to access these data
| and there will probably be less and less safeguards.
|
| For example in France we're in a permanent "state of
| emergency" since the attacks in 2015 (and now with covid),
| which grants more rights to the government/police and let
| them bypass some legal safeguards for "the greater good" but
| of course it's already being abused, not against terrorists,
| but against protesters, people squatting land to protest
| against projects that would have a negative impact on the
| environment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_to_Defend),
| &c.
| the_other wrote:
| It cannot be for "the greater good", or the law would not
| have been written that way before the "emergency".
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| Any government action that relies on emergency powers is
| an admission from that government that they have failed
| to govern using their prescribed legislative mandate. Any
| government that uses such power should be held to account
| for their failure to govern, because it's almost never
| necessary, and is always abused.
| subaquamille wrote:
| The tools necessary to achieve this good light not be the
| same in all corconstancies and you only want to extend
| the law when strictly necessary, not always. See food
| ratio in war times.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| We don't have mandatory in-home surveillance, for the moment.
| switch007 wrote:
| I get that.
|
| But I'm wondering if that really is what needs to occur
| before we consider a a state to be a complete surveillance
| state, if, for example, almost every home has some kind of
| device that can be exploited for surveillance, e.g
| landline, mobile phone, television, smart devices,
| laptops/desktops/tablets, internet routers/modems, smart
| meters, smart heating, rubbish collectoin etc?
|
| I.e. have we opted in to in-home surveillance to a
| sufficient level to make mandatory surveillance almost of
| no use.
| tyingq wrote:
| _" What do you think defines a "complete" surveillance
| state?"_
|
| Ratcheting up automation is what would make it different to
| me. While there are exceptions, for the most part, police
| look at all this data after they know about a crime.
|
| They have most of what they need to use the info to discover
| crime and automatically cite people. As a simple example,
| ANPR in two places could issue a speeding ticket if the time
| elasped between two scans is low enough. I'm sure it's
| happening somewhere, maybe a toll road. The difference would
| be when it's widespread.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| A ban is ineffectual without consequences. Criminal prosecution
| of police chiefs is what's needed, IMO.
| sneak wrote:
| Police in the US don't enforce the laws against other police or
| other powerful figures in governments, for the most part. This
| results in two different sets of laws, one that applies to
| police and government officials, and a much broader set that
| applies to you and I.
|
| The idea that the law is applied equally is a total fiction.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| 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 focused.
|
| Another challenge is sunk cost. San Diego for example has LED
| street lights that are also cameras and microphones, being used
| for machine learning. Would they ever rip those out if they
| were deemed illegal? Or would they just pause the collection
| and wait for people to forget? [1]
|
| [1] - https://www.govtech.com/smart-cities/Smart-Streetlight-
| Data-...
| 8note wrote:
| Cities don't have much ability to handle bad cops though. The
| police unions are too powerful
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Very true, good point.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| 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.
| smt88 wrote:
| Unfortunately, you have situations where cases are _started_
| using inadmissible investigation tactics, but presented to a
| jury without them.
|
| In those situations, the prosecution may succeed, which
| actually adds incentive to conduct the illegal
| investigations.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Do individuals care about wasted taxpayer's resources?
| They're getting paid to do their job, regardless of dropped
| case or not. The defendant spends their time and money and
| has to live a stressful life.
| cwkoss wrote:
| 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.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| Police are largely protected from criminal prosecution because
| they know exactly how cruel and inhumane the criminal justice
| system is.
|
| If they _are_ indicted they often have special rules for how
| and when they will be arrested / interrogated through union
| contracts. A way to solve this is legislation at the local
| level that a) makes some of these specific unequal rules
| illegal, but also b) fixes the inhumane parts of the justice
| system for _everyone_.
| snarf21 wrote:
| I think the more practical consequence is to fine and place
| injunctions on the software providers. They have the most to
| lose for violating compliance.
| zupreme wrote:
| 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 to see, again and again, that people we
| (civilians) fund the salaries of, see us as beneath them - as
| evidenced by how we are held to the letter of ordinances and laws
| by them, while they break ordinances and laws with seemingly
| wanton abandon.
|
| This is unlikely to change until police are held to the exact
| same legal and prosecutorial rigors as those they police.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >At some point governments will have to address the elephant in
| the room.
|
| Crime?
|
| If a community is suffering from a very high crime rate (and
| some American cities are amongst the most violent cities in the
| world) - why are we prioritizing one set of rights (right to
| privacy) over another (right to personal security, right to
| raise children in a safe environment)? In many cases, you can't
| have one with the other. Privacy or Personal security - pick
| one.
|
| And there is a class component to this. If you live in a nice
| safe (and affluent) neighborhood, I'm sure privacy is much more
| important to you because you don't have to worry about your
| children being hurt by or recruited into gangs on the way to
| school. You don't have to worry about getting mugged or
| assaulted walking to the store. If you live in a community with
| a high crime rate, are you sure you want to focus on privacy
| and rights of criminals?
| 8note wrote:
| There's a much easier way? Remove access to weapons. It's not
| a 2 way balance. America has chosen that access to weapons to
| commit crimes with is more important than personal safety or
| privacy, and no amount of giving up privacy will make up for
| prioritizing weapons
| macspoofing wrote:
| >There's a much easier way? Remove access to weapons.
|
| There are no simple solutions and to pretend that all you
| need to do is X and then therefore everything will work is
| naive to the extreme. This kind of argumentation, where
| reality on the ground is ignored in favor of some pie-in-
| the-sky hypothetical policy, is not actually conducive to
| actually helping people suffering from crime (not just gun
| violence but crime).
| Falling3 wrote:
| >In many cases, you can't have one with the other. Privacy or
| Personal security - pick one.
|
| You have a lot of work ahead of you to demonstrate that
| empirical fact. I haven't seen any compelling evidence that
| infringing on our right to privacy makes use safer in any
| meaningful way - though I have seen evidence to indicate it,
| in fact, makes us less safe.
| rendall wrote:
| > _we (civilians)_
|
| I just want to remind everyone that police are civilians too. I
| also sometimes forget
| qntty wrote:
| civilian noun
|
| 2a : one not on active duty in the armed services or not on a
| police or firefighting force
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Why would firefighters not be civilians?
| qntty wrote:
| I don't know exactly, but it sounds like the word is
| context-dependent. During war, it means people who aren't
| in the military, but during peacetime it means people who
| aren't expected to risk their lives in more ordinary
| ways.
|
| [If the jobs of firefighters seems irreproachable or
| lacking authority compared to military or police, then
| maybe it would help to remember that firefighters turned
| their hoses on civil rights protesters in the 60s. No
| doubt there are many similar examples of firefighter's
| behavior being clearly outside of the what is thought to
| be typical of civilians.]
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| Some dictionaries seem to disagree with you:
|
| - a person who is not a member of the police or the armed
| forces
|
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/civil.
| ..
|
| - one not on active duty in the armed services or not on a
| police or firefighting force
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/civilian
|
| - a person who is not on active duty with a military, naval,
| police, or fire fighting organization.
|
| https://www.dictionary.com/browse/civilian
|
| I'm a little curious, why should they be considered
| civilians?
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > why should they be considered civilians?
|
| Because they are. Robert Peel was insistent on exactly that
| point when he set up the police force in the UK. See, for
| instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
|
| Edit: corrected URL
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| No, they are not. They are literally instruments of the
| government's monopoly on violence.
|
| I have no idea why you reference a dead politician's
| antiquated analysis of the role of the police.. shit has
| happened since 1850, and I personally believe catholics
| should not be barred from parliament. Also, not everyone
| lives in the UK.
|
| Edit: as an example: what's "sir" Robert Peel's view on
| facial recognition...?
| Maha-pudma wrote:
| Not everyone lives in America which is what most of this
| thread seems to be about.
|
| No idea why you're mentioning Catholics in the UK
| Parliament. Unless its an attempt at discrediting the
| previous commenters statement.
|
| We certainly refer to them as the civi-police in the
| military. Though we don't have the gun issues the US has,
| but that seems based on an antiquated amendment even
| older the Peels analysis.
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| > No idea why you're mentioning Catholics in the UK
| Parliament.
|
| Look up Robert Peel
| 8note wrote:
| Ah, so if they shoot me at all, it's assault with a deadly
| weapon, just like any other civilian
| Erlich_Bachman wrote:
| Are you confusing it with the word "citizen"?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| As armed representatives of the state, I would argue that
| they are not. They're not military, but they're definitely
| not civilians.
| rapind wrote:
| > This is unlikely to change until police are held to the exact
| same legal and prosecutorial rigors as those they police.
|
| Forget that! Police should be held to a "higher" standard.
| These are people we've trusted to walk around with guns and big
| sticks. Shit's so backwards.
| m463 wrote:
| I still think about "no country for old men".
|
| And the busses of people in mexico.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That isn't really true. Have you read half the corporate
| policies published by large companies? Neither have most of
| their employees. Nobody cares and they're not enforced until
| Something Bad happens, at which point it's time to open the
| book for the first time to see which rule the designated
| scapegoat can be found to have broken.
|
| The problem with the police is that the institutional Something
| Bad doesn't align with the actually bad things that happen when
| they break the rules. The institutional Something Bad is bad
| press.
|
| The actual bad thing is sending an innocent person to prison
| while a guilty one stays free to continue committing robberies
| and murders. Or the same sort of "bring me the man, I'll find
| you the crime" except used _by_ the police against dissidents
| and anti-authoritarians instead of the people presiding over
| some corporate incompetence.
|
| But when that doesn't result in bad press, nobody gets punished
| and then it keeps happening.
|
| This is why it's important to have a media willing to hold any
| administration's feet to the fire. Ironically, getting the
| election results many of the people who care about this wanted
| is having the opposite effect, as now the pressure is off to
| actually do anything about the problem.
|
| Complaining about it when the other guy is in is rhetorically
| advantageous; actually doing something about it when you're in
| costs political capital. So now we get to see what they do. But
| based on the existing media rhetoric, the implication seems to
| be _more_ police state rather than less.
|
| Of course, the media is not just The Media, it's also this. So
| write your Congress critters.
| handoflixue wrote:
| I think there's two key differences here:
|
| 1) The police can get away with stuff even when the public
| has clear video proof of wrong-doing. Usually that's enough
| to at least trigger the "sacrifice a scapegoat" process, but
| not here.
|
| 2) The police can get away with violating not only policy,
| but actual laws.
| danShumway wrote:
| Right. I'm less sympathetic to this argument than I was
| years ago when I first started paying more attention to
| police corruption, because since then I've watched
| widespread protests happen over police brutality, and I've
| watched prosecutors literally just refuse to charge the
| officers involved.
|
| The protests didn't matter, prosecutors would not
| consciously attack the people on "their side."
|
| It's an argument that sounds good, and in a system that
| wasn't so fundamentally broken, it might even be true. But
| it doesn't hold up to the reality we're seeing with police
| departments. We're past the point where we can describe the
| problem as just being about education or awareness. The
| current system is brazen.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > Nobody cares and they're not enforced until Something Bad
| happens,
|
| That's not my experience. I'm not claiming that it is never
| true just that as far as I can tell, in the UK and Norway, it
| is mostly not.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| I would certainly believe that this is different outside of
| the US.
|
| The US is very litigious and as a result the rule book is
| often long and complicated enough that nobody really
| understands it because it's written by lawyers to avoid
| liability rather than as a set of practical measures
| designed to improve real outcomes.
|
| Also, whenever Something Bad happens they generally add new
| rules to address it, even if the existing rules would have
| prevented it had people been following them. So the
| complexity grows over time and makes it less likely that
| anybody even reads the rules, much less implements them.
|
| This also differs by industry or even by which rule book it
| is. If you have reasonable policies for handling hazardous
| materials, people follow them because if they don't then
| _they_ get hurt. But even in the same company, the company
| policy on other things only gets followed if it gets
| enforced, and only gets enforced if not doing so caused
| trouble in practice.
| feralimal wrote:
| Lol - really??!?
|
| Governments will have to address the elephant in the room? Why
| on earth would they ever do that?! This system is working
| perfectly. They write the laws! The police (and army) are their
| force! That is what governments do!
|
| Perhaps, they could write a law and apply it retrospectively do
| square things off tidily, but why bother?
|
| But really, once you have total control over what is considered
| right or wrong, why would they change anything?
|
| You should take a listen to the Quash - a legal insider to gain
| a better understanding of how things work: https://the-
| quash.captivate.fm/episode/politicians-lie-its-t...
| cwkoss wrote:
| Law enforcement should not just be held to an equal standard as
| citizens, they should be held to a much higher one.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| 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
| surrendering suspect in a "grassy ditch" was illegal, even
| though doing the same thing in a wooded area had precedent. And
| of course, since the cop was let off the hook, no new precedent
| was made.
|
| And even when cops do finally cross the line, they just move
| towns or states and get a new job. Police unions have fought
| long and hard to avoid even the slightest forms of
| accountability; in most states being fired for cause isn't
| enough to get your license pulled. This protection for bad cops
| comes at the cost of us all, both in terms of settlements paid
| by our money, and by unnecessary deaths inflicted on the poor
| and vulnerable by the state.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| QI is horrifically racist. A group of black community members
| and pastors, I believe, were getting some coffee before
| boarding a Greyhound, and an officer "moved them on", so as
| to prevent (in his perception or claim) a dangerous situation
| from a group of people who were "upset" by this.
|
| They refused, and despite no crime being committed (as was
| later shown in court, with a directed verdict of no
| violation), all fifteen of them were arrested.
|
| They sued, claiming civil rights violations. Courts found 1)
| that there was indeed a lack of constitutionality in what
| happened, and 2) police were not required to "predict"(?)
| what laws were constitutional or not.
|
| Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierson_v._Ray
|
| This rubs me the wrong way in a much less egregious way. I'm
| an avid photographer, and while my area isn't really focused
| in a problematic way, I've read many a story of photographers
| being prevented from photographing police, or in public, or
| similar.
|
| We are expected to know what our constitutional rights are -
| remember, "ignorance is no excuse" when it comes to the law
| for us.
|
| But, as above, multiple police chiefs have said, when
| addressing issues of such photographers being later released
| without charge, "We cannot expect our police to be
| constitutional lawyers".
|
| This is an issue to the extent that things like this are
| created: http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm
| eudydyyd wrote:
| That's a pretty weak line of reasoning for declaring QI
| racist. The reason police were given QI protection was
| because the court felt that the police were shielded by the
| same laws that already shielded judges so long as their
| actions were undertaken during the performance of the
| duties.
| gabereiser wrote:
| ^ 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
| though.
| wtetzner wrote:
| > I'm not saying we don't need them
|
| We need them, but we also need them to be held accountable
| for their actions.
| gabereiser wrote:
| Absolutely
| ashtonkem wrote:
| 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.
| gabereiser wrote:
| We absolutely need cops, courts, prisons, jails and all
| that. The issue I have is with how they are _deployed_ as
| tools to correct societies behavior. The way the USA uses
| them, it doesn 't work and only serves to suppress a
| group of minorities from becoming participants nor
| leaders in society.
|
| Jail is supposed to be for those who did wrong and need a
| "timeout" so to speak. A wake up call or reality check on
| their behavior. Prison is more longer term
| rehabilitation. Problem is, our society's tolerance of
| crime and sentences for said crimes lands people in jail
| more often than not. Difference being jail sentences are
| up to a year, prison year+.
|
| Not to mention the absurd bias towards minorities in how
| we police, how we judge, etc. to fill said jails and
| prisons which are increasingly becoming _For-Profit_ by
| leasing prison workforce labor out at 1890s labor costs
| of $0.27 /day. It's legalized slavery.
| tiahura wrote:
| _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 their paycheck. If we did, no one
| would work there.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > 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.
| _jal wrote:
| 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 discussion before.
| tiahura wrote:
| _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.
|
| Here's another tell. Watch daytime TV for an hour and
| you'll see attorneys advertising re: Insurance companies,
| J&J Talc, Monsanto, Me Too, the Catholic Church, the Boy
| Scouts, Monsanto, Mesh manufacturers, Asbestos claims,
| Elmiron claims, ad infinitum. 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.
| burkaman wrote:
| 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 there was already
| precedent.
|
| Maybe some court cases will help explain. Here's Mattos
| v. Agarano, where officers tased a defenseless,
| completely non-threatening pregnant woman for fun: https:
| //cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2011/10/17/0...
|
| A clear framing of the catch 22:
|
| > In determining whether an officer is entitled to
| qualified immunity, we employ a two-step test: first, we
| decide whether the officer violated a plaintiff's
| constitutional right; if the answer to that inquiry is
| "yes," we proceed to determine whether the constitutional
| right was "clearly established in light of the specific
| context of the case" at the time of the events in
| question.
|
| Even a general precedent isn't enough, you must find a
| previous incident relevant to the specific context of the
| case, which again is impossible because any officers in
| the past ~50 years would also have been protected by
| qualified immunity.
|
| > In sum, Brooks's alleged offenses were minor. She did
| not pose an immediate threat to safety of the officers or
| others. She actively resisted arrest insofar as she
| refused to get out of her car when instructed to do so
| and stiffened her body and clutched her steering wheel to
| frustrate the officers' efforts to remove her from her
| car. Brooks did not evade arrest by flight, and no other
| exigent circumstances existed at the time. She was seven
| months pregnant, which the officers knew, and they tased
| her three times within less than one minute, inflicting
| extreme pain on Brooks.[10] A reasonable fact-finder
| could conclude, taking the evidence in the light most
| favorable to Brooks, that the officers' use of force was
| unreasonable and therefore constitutionally excessive.
|
| Of course, qualified immunity applied, there was no
| reason to further investigate the constitutional
| violation, case dismissed.
|
| You can look at Kaufman County v. Winzer, where officers
| shot (17 times) and killed a mentally impaired man 6
| seconds after seeing him, because a completely different
| man had shot at them and they were scared.
| https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/kaufman-
| county-t...
|
| If you like, you can also read about how qualified
| immunity doesn't even achieve its alleged purpose, to
| shield officers from wasting time with discovery and
| other trial-related obligations.
| https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/Schwartz_1ki1sac4.pdf
|
| You can read a much better researched article on this
| topic from an actual legal scholar, rather than a random
| internet commenter: http://ndlawreview.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/08/2-Schwartz...
|
| You can read Jessop v. City of Fresno, where officers who
| literally stole $200,000+ could not be sued, because no
| officer before the advent of qualified immunity had been
| convicted of that particular crime, and the legislature
| hadn't thought to pass a law saying "police officers
| can't steal": https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opin
| ions/2019/09/04/1...
|
| > At the time of the incident, there was no clearly
| established law holding that officers violate the Fourth
| or Fourteenth Amendment when they steal property seized
| pursuant to a warrant. For that reason, the City Officers
| are entitled to qualified immunity.
|
| Let me know how many more cases it will take to convince
| you, and I'll be happy to list them.
| ruined wrote:
| thanks for this
| [deleted]
| tiahura wrote:
| I read Matos. There is nothing indicating it was for fun.
| She was resisting arrest and they stunned (not Tased) her
| first in the leg and then arm and then neck in order to
| complete the arrest. They made sure not to zap her belly.
| She was fine, baby was fine.
|
| As I've grown older, I've learned to not waste time
| worrying about assholes who engineer their own
| misfortune.
|
| My point is that this seems like a case where the cops
| should have been (and maybe were) disciplined within the
| employment context, i.e. more training, suspension, etc.
| But I see little benefit to society to be gained by
| letting these guys be personally sued.
| burkaman wrote:
| Well, the Mattos case was dismissed without ever deciding
| if the officers were justified. Unless you think it's
| physically impossible for an officer to tase someone
| inappropriately (keeping in mind that tasers can kill
| people), you can see why this is a problem. The courts
| will not even entertain the possibility that an officer
| has done something wrong.
|
| > My point is that this seems like a case where the cops
| should have been (and maybe were) disciplined within the
| employment context, i.e. more training, suspension, etc.
|
| They weren't. What incentive would the department have to
| discipline them?
|
| I'm interested in your thoughts on Jessop v. City of
| Fresno.
| [deleted]
| wtetzner wrote:
| > 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.
| mindslight wrote:
| 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.
| 8note wrote:
| Yeah the criminal defense is through union action to ensure
| that police get extra time to manufacture stories and the
| like before evidence can be collected
| [deleted]
| mattnewton wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Actually, in professions where we are talking about serious
| damages to people or property, the institution doesn't
| cover it and makes the practitioners buy insurance. Can you
| imagine if Surgeons and Lawyers operated on this pottery
| barn standard?
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Indeed, traditional professions such as doctors and
| lawyers are typically prohibited by law from being
| shielded by liability by a corporate veil. This is why,
| depending on the states, doctors and lawyers are
| typically organized as professional corporations or other
| similar terms rather than limited liability companies:
| they are specifically required to remain personally
| liable for their actions. Traditionally, this is what
| "professional" _meant_ : that you were individually
| accountable for your actions.
|
| Perhaps we should consider applying the same to law
| enforcement, a field which by its own rhetoric seemingly
| holds "professionalism" in high regard.
| guitarbill wrote:
| Surprisingly, police do fine in other countries without
| qualified immunity. And judges can strip QI, but this
| happens far, far too rarely. So maybe it shouldn't be the
| default.
| glitcher wrote:
| > And even when cops do finally cross the line, they just
| move towns or states and get a new job
|
| And even though our collective awareness about this issue is
| increasing, this just happened yesterday:
|
| https://www.npr.org/2021/01/28/961692068/officer-who-quit-
| wi...
| FireBeyond wrote:
| There is actually a national register of police who were
| fired, suspended, or resigned to avoid termination.
|
| During BLM, to the credit of one particular police chief,
| when terminating two racist officers, he had them de-
| registered as police in his state, and placed on this
| register.
|
| The problem? In a large number, even a majority of police
| departments, the Union CBA forbids the City or Department
| from looking at this register for hiring decisions.
| offtop5 wrote:
| What a horrible thing. I guarantee this will constantly find
| incorrect matches.
|
| Just like follicle investigators of the past, if it's completely
| inaccurate who cares because you can just scare some 19-year-old
| into a plea bargain. People with money won't be affected, they'll
| have high price lawyers who will get this ' evidence' thrown out.
| carapace wrote:
| 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
| tyranny_ (if such a thing is even possible; it sure sounds like
| an oxymoron, doesn 't it?)
|
| Yes, your privacy is a social fiction, but in return, we can stop
| almost all crime.
|
| 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?
|
| 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. If it
| would prevent a kid from getting kidnapped, or someone getting
| raped, or murdered, or even just getting hit by a hit-and-run
| driver, that I would agree to have my life JenniCam'd[2]. The
| fact is, it's already happening. E.g. your smart phone uploads
| your location data which is then sold off. Your smart TV sends
| pictures of the screen to the cloud. Your smart router listens to
| your conversations. Your smart electricity meter sends telemetry.
| Smart streetlights know where the cars are, smart cars know where
| the people are (a fleet of networked self-driving cars (auto-
| autos) is a ubiquitous surveillance system.) Etc.
|
| Imagine all the criminals who, when Snowden dropped his
| bombshell, only just then realized that the NSA _already had_ all
| their dirty laundry.
|
| [1] "Mrs Grundy is a figurative name for an extremely
| conventional or priggish person, a personification of the tyranny
| of conventional propriety. A tendency to be overly fearful of
| what others might think is sometimes referred to as _grundyism_.
| " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Grundy ("Grundiocracy"? Ew.)
|
| [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JenniCam
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifecasting_(video_stream)
| danShumway wrote:
| > 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.
| carapace wrote:
| > > 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.
|
| If it's not possible then I think we're destined for a very
| nasty future.
|
| I don't think a technologically sophisticated government can
| afford to be non-totalitarian (in the narrow sense I'm using
| here: making "total" use of available information technology.
| Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness
| ). I think if it tried it would be undermined by other
| governments.
|
| In re: this point, I find it discouraging that the Communists
| won in their _imperialistic_ effort to subdue the people of
| HK. I was hoping that technology would give the masses the
| edge over the central government but it doesn 't seem to have
| played out that way.
|
| > > Yes, your privacy is a social fiction, but in return, we
| can stop almost all crime.
|
| > No we can't,
|
| What would prevent it?
|
| > 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.
|
| I don't agree. I feel strongly that laws should be legitimate
| or repealed. We can't have _perfect_ enforcement, but
| technological advancement is exponentially reducing the cost
| of enforcement, eh?
|
| Is the answer _selective_ enforcement? That doesn 't sound
| right does it? If there are laws that we believe should be
| _imperfectly_ enforced then _that_ should be written into the
| law.
|
| For example, if you smoke pot, is it better for that to be
| legal, or illegal but most of the time cops won't bust you
| for smoking a joint?
|
| > 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.
|
| Well, I'll say this: the Capital riot is unprecedented in USA
| history and I think it will be a while before we can draw
| reliable conclusions from it. It does seem to me that the
| problems with the response to it that day did not stem from
| insufficient information.
|
| > 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.
|
| That's kind of my point: rather than trying to sequester the
| technology (which I believe is impossible) we have to use it
| well, or we'll fall into some sort of dystopian system.
|
| > > 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 wasn't clear. It's not a trade. You're going to be
| livestreaming anyway, whether you like it or not, so do we
| _also_ stop the kidnapping? That 's the question.
|
| I can't find the news article now, but I was reading a few
| months ago about this exact scenario: A young child in China
| was kidnapped and the authorities used the system there to
| locate and rescue the kid within a few hours.
|
| We in the West _could_ do that too but if we don 't because
| we value our personal privacy over the occasional kidnapped
| kid, well, I'm no fan of the CCP but that doesn't seem like a
| defensible moral position to me.
|
| > 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.
|
| To me that just sounds like closing the barn door after the
| horse already bolted. The technology is already deployed and
| more and more gets deployed every day. We should be talking
| about a universal highest-common-denominator of laws for the
| planet so that the decreasing cost of asymptotically-prefect
| enforcement becomes a solution rather than a problem!
|
| That makes more sense to me than fighting it because the laws
| are crap and unevenly enforced.
| t-writescode wrote:
| > Imagine all the criminals who, when Snowden dropped his
| bombshell, only just then realized that the NSA already had all
| their dirty laundry.
|
| As a country, the United States has decided that the Bill of
| Rights was important enough to write down, even if some bad
| people get to go free.
|
| As a country, the United States _also_ decided that wiretapping
| is illegal except when permitted in a specific instance, with
| approval from a judge.
|
| You may think it's okay, but our Founding Fathers and our
| predecessors decided that these things weren't okay, likely do
| to immediate dangers they had just been experiencing.
|
| Arguably, the software and practices that Snowden exposedallow
| after-the-fact wiretapping, where everything was recorded, but
| not looked at prior to the fact. I argue that is against the
| spirit of the wiretapping laws, myself.
| carapace wrote:
| I don't think these things are okay. I don't see a realistic
| way to prevent them.
| stakkur wrote:
| Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
| maedayx wrote:
| Whaaaaaat police departments breaking the law? Never!
| Bostonian wrote:
| 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?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| 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 <19 times in 20> 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 <violently> arrest that guy"
| bsenftner wrote:
| 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.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| That's a problem with police procedures and training of those
| who use facial recognition, not facial recognition per se.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Yes? Cities banned facial recognition use because police
| have proven unable to create effective procedures and
| training to prevent the problems.
| dhimes wrote:
| Indeed. Let's not forget, eyewitnesses are notoriously
| unreliable as well.
| Jkvngt wrote:
| Is this actually true though? It sounds great, but where's
| the data?
|
| * we need more than just the occasional anecdote to determine
| if this is a real issue
| keiferski wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-
| recogni...
| Ensorceled wrote:
| There are literally dozens of news stories about the wrong
| person being arrested for a crime they could not have
| committed. It's literally why cities have been banning the
| practice in the original news story.
| giardini wrote:
| Facial recognition software fails legal tests if used with
| large datasets. It does so b/c software does not
| discriminate in the same way the human mind does.
|
| For example, some facial recognition software identifies
| this picture of a man wearing glasses as actress Milla
| Jovovitch:
|
| https://images.newscientist.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2016/11/0...
|
| [The _New Scientist_ article from which the above picture
| is taken is "Glasses make face recognition tech think
| you're Milla Jovovich":
|
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/2111041-glasses-make-
| fa... ]
|
| The (PDF) original paper:
|
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sbhagava/papers/face-rec-ccs16.pdf
|
| Steven Talley was identified by the FBI as the primary
| suspect in two bank robberies using a facial recognition
| algorithm. He had an iron-clad alibi, but the police and
| FBI weren't convinced. In court one of the bank tellers
| said Talley definitely wasn't the robber. Nonetheless
| Talley lost his job, his wife and his family and was held
| in prison for months. For more details read:
|
| "LOSING FACE: How a Facial Recognition Mismatch Can Ruin
| Your Life"
|
| https://theintercept.com/2016/10/13/how-a-facial-
| recognition...
|
| I found out about the facial recognition failures from he
| outstanding book "Hello World" by Hannah Fry. Fry tells the
| story of Steven Talley as part of a chapter on crime, AI
| and facial recognition.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Hello-World-Being-Human-
| Algorithms/dp...
|
| Fry's book shows how/why facial recognition software simply
| does not work well enough to use in police work. She
| provides the studies and footnotes them. As Fry says:
|
| "If you're searching for a particular criminal in digital
| line-up of millions...the best-case scenario is that you
| won't find the right person one in six times...". That is
| not nearly good enough for law enforcement and the courts.
|
| -from "Hello World" by Hannah Fry
| glenda wrote:
| The police chief in Detroit said their facial recognition
| system had a 4% success rate. Presumably this means that
| 96% of the time they were targeting someone with absolutely
| no relation to the actual crime. What a complete waste of
| time and disregard for our civil liberties.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/detroit-
| police-c...
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >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.
| exporectomy wrote:
| > automate the sending of expired inspection sticker tickets
|
| I think that's an excellent use of the technology. These are
| minor offences that would be too expensive and burdensome to
| pursue individually by hand. If it were enforced reliably,
| almost nobody would do be doing it.
|
| People get charged a late penalty for not paying their power
| bill. It's enforced with 100% reliability. But expired
| inspection tickets is less obnoxious because you can just
| stop driving your car when it becomes illegal to do so. You
| can't just return electricity you already used but haven't
| paid for yet.
|
| If you believe people should drive cars without safety
| certifications, that's a different issue. In that case, the
| solution isn't haphazard enforcement but no enforcement at
| all.
| urda wrote:
| Of course they do, the Union is far too powerful and nobody holds
| them accountable.
| Simulacra wrote:
| Police seem to do many things despite bans, or at least despite
| court rulings that tell them repeatedly not to. Photography of
| police is the one that comes to mind, and maybe even the
| Stingray.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| 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 solution instead might be the same with deepfakes: fill
| everything with junk data.
| netizen-9748 wrote:
| Parallel construction sounds an awful lot like lying
| octostone wrote:
| They're allowed to do that too
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| A lot of the comments in this discussion should be tagged
| with the country to which they apply.
| netizen-9748 wrote:
| They're allowed to lie to suspects, not the courts where
| parallel construction happens. A defense attorney can't get
| evidence stricken when it came from dubious sources when
| they lie in court about the source.
| sneak wrote:
| > _They 're allowed to lie to suspects, not the courts
| where parallel construction happens._
|
| That's only true in theory. In practice, police lies are
| one of the pillars of the US "justice" system.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_perjury
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/18/nyregion/testilying-
| polic...
|
| https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/police-
| testilyin...
| netizen-9748 wrote:
| That is exactly the problem
| voxic11 wrote:
| > The two senior DEA officials, who spoke on behalf of
| the agency but only on condition of anonymity, said the
| process is kept secret to protect sources and
| investigative methods. "Parallel construction is a law
| enforcement technique we use every day," one official
| said. "It's decades old, a bedrock concept."
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20130809014315/https://www.re
| ute...
| snarf21 wrote:
| You could require the software to have a warrant number entered
| in order to do FR. This means you need probable cause first and
| you need to be able to convince a judge it is warranted.
| lumost wrote:
| Enforcement on these issues is trivial, given that the local
| authority actually desires to enforce the ban. Facial
| Recognition software is not free.
|
| The basic steps to stop these issues are
|
| 1. (The local authority) mandates that all contracts with
| vendors indicate that they do not perform facial recognition
| services for the police 2. (The local authority's) lawyers sign
| off on vendor contracts ( already happens ) 3. The auditors
| verify that no one is paying/expensing a facial recognition
| vendor.
|
| Generally, working around your employers legal/audit mechanisms
| is grounds for termination. If the problem is data sharing with
| partner agencies... then the local authority needs a privacy
| law on criminal evidence that could be used for facial
| recognition.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _Facial Recognition software is not free._
|
| Open source versions will be here before long.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| How does that change any of what the comment you are
| responding to says?
| IAmAtWork wrote:
| 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 and offices and non profits protecting civil rights
| also gets technological and financial boost.
|
| Everything else is just attacking the windmills.
| howaboutnope wrote:
| Yeah, and the difference between drinking a glass of water and
| drowning is also just one of scale and rate. Same for a pat on
| the back, and being violently attacked -- it's just physical
| impact, the only difference is the speed.
|
| > I am not happy or supporting either
|
| Then don't.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >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.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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._
|
| "Nuclear weapons are not a big deal, we used rocks and arrows
| for the same purpose in the past anyway..."
|
| The similarities between past and present are irrelevant to
| draw conclusions from without also having the difference in
| mind.
|
| And the difference here is one of scale. Dosage makes the cure
| or the poison.
| donpott wrote:
| "Sometimes a difference in scale makes a difference in kind"
| (heard in a CGPGrey video, but I'm sure the quote predates it)
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Something like it goes back a couple of thousand years or
| more, see the note about Stalin and "Quantity has a quality
| all its own." at https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=J
| oseph_Stalin&old...
| breakfastduck wrote:
| It's not the same though, because when done manually it is
| possible to be overloaded with the sheer volume of imagery to
| comb through.
|
| Like saying someone is able to manually throw a grenade so we
| might as well just carpet bomb everything.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Guns existed before machine guns, you do have to consider the
| consequences of a bifurcation (loose speak)
| breakfastduck wrote:
| The perfect event (the capitol) to normalise the practice even
| further.
|
| And those who should be opposing it most passionately will be
| applauding it's use, because they started with 'the bad guys'.
| mnd999 wrote:
| 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.
| prussian wrote:
| 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.
| pepperonipizza wrote:
| 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?
| rtkwe wrote:
| 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.
| user-the-name wrote:
| That is 100% on HOW the police do it.
|
| In the BLM protests, the police were entirely the
| aggressors, looking for a fight.
| ausbah wrote:
| 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
| tacocataco wrote:
| "...the police do not owe a specific duty to provide
| police services to citizens..." (1)
|
| (1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of
| _Columb...
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Doesn't apply in the circumstances of this event since it
| happened in London, England.
| roenxi wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| 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.
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| Policing in North America as we know it today arose in
| the south from Overseer's and slavery. [0][1]
|
| Their job has always been to protect the rich, keep
| minorities and the lower classes oppressed.
|
| [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-
| invention-... [1]
| https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-
| slavery-a...
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Give me a break. Enough with this 1619 style revisionist
| history that views the history of the world through the
| lens of black people being slaves. It doesn't even pass
| the sniff test. It's way too lazy to assume that
| everything has such a simple answer.
| bluntfang wrote:
| I definitely agree that nothing has such a simple answer,
| but isn't it a little dishonest to ignore the fact that
| the US was built on the back of slave labor?
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| There was a _period_ of US history where _a particular
| region of the country_ was _primarily_ (although
| certainly not singularly, and certainly not to the extent
| 1619 chaplains would have you believe) resourced through
| slave labor, specifically _plantation style slavery_
| which indeed was formed in this region, yes, but that is
| much more nuanced discussion and tosses out this whole
| grandiose vision of America being a big power struggle
| between white men cracking whips at black people.
|
| Btw not sure who is flagging you for asking an honest
| question. This is how people learn and refine their
| thinking.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| If i report someome trying to kill me, i'd very much prefer
| the police to act immediately
| Thiez wrote:
| 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.
| tacocataco wrote:
| IANAL, but I was under the impression that the police
| have no obligation help people. [1]
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of
| _Columb...
| fakedang wrote:
| Oh my God, your country truly is fucked up, isn't it?
| I've lived in police states where the laws aren't
| steaming garbage like that.
| ngold wrote:
| 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.
| bluntfang wrote:
| i pick lazy over dishonest any day of the week.
| simonh wrote:
| Riots are dangerous situations, I think they need to do both.
| Put in place a physical security presence to contain and
| limit the damage, and address he worst cases involving
| violence, but also consider that escalation may not be
| appropriate. In a riot it unlikely you're going to be able to
| quash it and clear it up completely, so you also need to make
| sure perpetrators don't get away without consequences.
|
| In the 2012 riots did the police really have no street
| presence at all? That's not what I remember.
| pdkl95 wrote:
| > lazy policing
|
| From Susan Landau's 2016 testimony[1] before the House
| Judiciary Committee regarding Apple's encryption on the San
| Bernardino shooter's iphone:
|
| >> "Instead of embracing the communications and device
| security we so badly need for securing US public and private
| data, law enforcement continues to press hard to undermine
| security in the misguided desire to preserve simple, but
| outdated, investigative techniques."
|
| >> "We need 21st century techniques to secure the data that
| 21st century enemies--organized crime and nation-state
| attackers--seek to steal and exploit. Twentieth century
| approaches that provide law enforcement with the ability to
| investigate but also simplify exploitations and attacks are
| not in our national security interest. Instead of laws and
| regulation that weaken our protections, we should enable law
| enforcement to develop 21st century capabilities for
| conducting investigations."
|
| >> "Developing such capabilities will involve deep changed
| for the Bureau, which remains agent-based, not technology-
| based."
|
| Whenever law enforcement complains that they need tools that
| give them access to _more data_ they never mention that they
| have access to _far more_ data than any point in history.
| Yes, some types of data they have used in the past may be
| going dark, but they have gained an incredible breadth of new
| tools.
|
| Unfortunately, learning new investigation techniques requires
| money, training, and effort. Shoveling as much data as
| possible onto the problem makes the actual investigation more
| difficult, but they do it anyway when it also acts _de facto_
| as another source of _power_. ~sigh~ This crap needs to be
| reigned in. Fast.
|
| [1] (pdf) https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20160301/10
| 4573/HHRG...
| hef19898 wrote:
| Funny enough, the capitol insurgents brought their own
| surveillance. Courtesy of FB and Twitter. Pretty sure all the
| video material streamed and posted by themselves would be more
| than enough in that case.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Yes but there's a difference between reviewing evidence and
| using mass facial recognition software to scour literally
| everything.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Oh, it definitely is. Going through public material or
| videos provided as evidence, even using facial recognition,
| after a crime is IMHO ok. Preemptively recording
| everything, and using facial recognition right from the
| bat, is very different. The latter shouldn't be acceptable
| in a free and democratic society.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Absolutely agree with your second point, but still not
| sure I'm comfortable using it 'post crime' so to speak.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Me neither. We now have surveillance capabilities like
| never before, stuff the Gestapo, Stasi or the NKVD
| couldn't even dream about.
|
| Funny enough we are mostly using it to sell adds. Until
| you look at China and their surveillance activities. I do
| not want any of that. Especially if all that can be
| replaced by proper police work. Like unbiased
| investigation, arresting people (just imagine if
| authorities had arrested all the insurectionists right on
| the spot). I am afraid so, that we will have more
| surveillance and not less.
| [deleted]
| Jkvngt wrote:
| Everybody just keep wearing masks. It's not like we have much of
| a choice, haha!
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