After 9 months, the New Orleans Police Department’s use of facial recognition has resulted in zero arrests and multiple false positives

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/

Huh. It's almost like cops are constantly wasting money on bullshit.

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.

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 removed) 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 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.

lots of nice biometric additions to the database tho, right? 😠

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

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.

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?

NOPD failing its citizen, one bad idea at a time

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.

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.

well, good on them for not arresting false positives at least

https://files.catbox.moe/4m3dkp.mp4

if you think it's good that cops have more tech you are the dumbest fucking hog imaginable

Surprise surprise!

NOPD is a joke to begin with.

And this is lemmy, a propaganda platform. That site cited as news. First source, no link. 2nd source, another "news website." 3rd source, Twitter. Half the article, opinion. OK. I'll see myself out, thank you very much.