Cops and wasting resources on stupid shit that doesn’t actually help them solve crimes.
Name a more iconic duo.
Comment on Amazon defends facial-recognition tech sale to FBI despite moratorium | Computer Weekly
ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 8 months ago
New Orleans did a pilot with allowing facial recognition for major felonies and it just didn’t work at all. Of the 15 requests, 9 failed to make a match and of the 6 that did return a “match,” 3 were the wrong person.
That’s a small sample size — most cities don’t release data — but it explains why cities that happily use facial recognition software don’t see reductions in crime or cleared cases. It’s just a complete waste of money and the investigators’ time. Facial recognition tech can (usually) identify friends in photos but criminals aren’t posing for fancy modern phone cameras in decent lighting. They’re using security cam stills and anyone committing a major felony probably has their face at least partially covered.
It’s like that software that’s supposed to identify gunshots but has so many false positives, police stop even bothering to follow-up after awhile. Maybe not as stupid as the NYPD buying robots but still a huge waste of resources.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
Law enforcement isn’t interested in solving crimes. It’s interested in securing convictions. False convictions do nicely to advance police and DA careers. And innocent bystanders are fine for putting warm bodies into empty prison cells.
doppelgangmember@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Not to mention the primarily black population of Louisiana who are disproportionately targeted for crimes will be the greatest number of false positives .
Due to the common knowledge the facial recognition is severely lacking when it comes to successfully identifying black populations due to darker tones being harder to differentiate.
This would take an existing problem and magnify it by creating a larger, more automated police state.
Not to mention data privacy/security, which the LA DMV just got their data hacked in the last two years…
Seriously a public safety violation all-around.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
It’s not even this, if you use high quality cameras, black skin can be easily and well photographed.
The issue is by and large most security cameras use super cheap cameras that don’t have a wide range of color they can capture, so you end up losing all definition on the faces of darker skinned individuals.
This has been an issue since cameras were first invented, and better cameras that solve this issue were created long ago.
It’s because our capitalist overlords are cheap bastards.
agent_flounder@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Also possible that the systems are trained on light skinned people more?
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 8 months ago
No I don’t think this is a training issue. Light skin physically reflects more light, which gives cameras significantly more data to work with when they detect shadows/etc.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Better cameras isn’t enough - you also need better lighting. But that would be really unpleasant, nobody wants a light shining in their face.