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/
Actually, all 15 were of black people. 14 were of black men, one was a black woman.
Zero arrests as well.
New Orleans is pretty black, but thats just impressive.
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…
Minor correction.
15 out of 15 requests were of black people. 14 of those requests were black men and 1 was a black woman.
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.
More recently, there was also Google Photos mistaking a photo of a black couple as "gorillas", back in 2015.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33347866
On a funnier note, there was also the AI tool turning a pixelated photo of Barack Obama into that of a white man.
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.
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.
A lot if forensic "science" is utter bunk. Yet it continues to be used. Having a fair and equitable system was never the point.
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.
The white liberals building this technology say they're all progressive yet only surround themselves with people like them and only build products for people like them. A lack of diversity in tech like this is a lack of good testing.
Oh they are progressive. They'll support Black Lives Matter and sympathise with Iranian women.
But there's only so much anybody can do when it's the entire US (and further afield) social structure at fault. It's the same where I am. I work on a project with 3 other white guys. If I put a job advert up for another programmer, who will apply? 3-4 more white guys.
I agree that it's a lack of good testing. Especially when you consider that it'll be mostly used to pick black guys out of a database. And especially so in New Orleans.
They're more libertarian than liberal. Anti worker rights, anti consumer rights, and anti taxation.
The only government spending they're in favour of is government spending and subsidies on tech e.g. Tesla, space X, and the entire military complex.
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
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.
Serious question, what is the right number of officers for a city that size? 1 officer per 400 people or so doesn't sound very low to me.
NOPD's stated goal is 1600, a ratio of 1:227 persons.
The actual ratio is 1:385
Cleveland, similar in size to New Orleans, has a ratio 1:310. They also state that they are suffering from a serious police shortage.
By comparison:
NYC has a ratio of 1:166
Chicago 1:180
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
Well, I could have told you this. (Techdirt has plenty of articles on how facial recognition software mostly generates false positives and ruins the days, if not the lives, of innocents).
On a similar note, the massive camera array of London, to which law-enforcement and state security departments are plugged in, is useful for less than 0.1% of incidents.
So rolling it out state- or nationwide next?
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.
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
