Dallas Police Falsely Credit TrapWire System For Arrests 31
In April, the Texas Department of Public Safety told a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, inspired by information leaked by Wikileaks to ask about ways that the agency might be compromising citizen's privacy and other rights, that the TrapWire behavioral analysis system employed in combination with surveillance equipment posted at various high-profile locations around the state had resulted in 44 arrests. However, after numerous public records requests for more information about those claimed arrests, the agency admitted that the true figure is somewhat lower: namely, zero. The story naturally involves "millions" of dollars (though an exact figure for the zero-arrest system isn't named), and Austin-based Stratfor, a company that's been
named
a
few times here on Slashdot.
Even if it was true, terrible value for money (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if it was true... millions of dollars for ... 44 arrests?
Wonder what the arrest rate of 20 extra pairs of feet on the street is?
Re:Even if it was true, terrible value for money (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if it was true... millions of dollars for ... 44 arrests?
Wonder what the arrest rate of 20 extra pairs of feet on the street is?
Yep, everything's bigger in Texas: the State Police and the police state.
Even if it was true... millions of breaches into the innocent communications of private citizens for... 44 arrests.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Even if it was true, terrible value for money (Score:4, Insightful)
None of the stories I've seen put the figure at "dozens of millions of pounds". This article [telegraph.co.uk] from The Telegraph puts the figure at £11.1 million. The article notes that £6.5m of that figure are "police officer pay costs that would be incurred in normal duties" and mentions overtime costs and "indirect" costs, tallying together to an additional £3.8m. Also, if the picture in the article shows a typical guard detail we see at least 4 uniformed officers, not 2.
We should also take into account those 4 officers are not engaged in regular beat policing but the very specific task of waiting for a very specific person to exit a specific location. There's also the very real possibility this is a politically-motivated policing detail with all the visibility and CYA costs that come with it.
The point may yet be valid but to a lesser degree and perhaps not at all just based on numbers. And with the other factors the Assange case may be so unusual that no meaningful comparison can be made.
Re: (Score:1)
Even if it was true... millions of dollars for ... 44 arrests?
Wonder what the arrest rate of 20 extra pairs of feet on the street is?
I can tell you haven't read the article, it's supposed to be some service to detect people casing a location.
You all can debate the value of THAT, but I'd expect this system to generate zero arrests, and feed into other intelligence tools.
What's the point of posting if you don't know what you're talking about? I suppose if "surveillance detection" lead to ten thousand arrests a year you would have been OK with that and finished your powdered doughnuts instead of jumping in here?
Re: (Score:1)
Data collection for other purposes? (Score:5, Insightful)
DPS != Dallas Police (Score:3, Informative)
DPS is the state law enforcement agency. Dallas Police is the police force for the City of Dallas. Maybe that's not an important distinction, but I think basic facts are important for the credibility of a story.
Pork, pork, lovely pork (Score:1)
How about doing the policing job first, instead of focusing on the toys and lying about them so you can keep playing and pretending you're doing a decent job of your actual job?
And still... (Score:4)
The police wonder why fewer and fewer people trust them at all...
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:And still... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
As do the Slashdot editors, who can't even be assed to double-check that the city of Dallas and the State of Texas might have separate police forces.
Re: (Score:2)
It's still law enforcement, regardless of the exact jurisdiction...
Puffery? LOL (Score:3)
"DPS puffs up its stats the way Donald Trump puffs his hair."
Face it, cops are cops. They get off on the adrenaline rush when the make a bust, and then they get off on bragging about it afterwards. And, of course the bragging gets inflated.
Except, in this case, they never even made a bust!
so's yer grammer (Score:1)
Everybody runs (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I am not sure from reading the page what exactly Trapwire does. Does it sit, grab facial recognition data, and try to put two and two together if it notices a person at certain places at certain times, then sound an alert to the local security that "so and so is a risk" because they were first at Spatula City, then the Duct Tape Shoppe, now they are showing up at the Vend-A-Goat convention?
I wonder if this is a spinoff from the software used in LV gambling establishments where if someone is banned from one
Evidence Based Surveillance (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Someone with cops in their family defending the integrity of cops? It must be true, then.
Re: (Score:3)
Do you mean we should look at the crime rates that took a precipitous fall in the mid 1990s? Those crime rates you want us to look at? The ones that have been falling ever since, even through the worst recession in decades? How much more spending on putting "broken window" offenders in expensive prisons do we need to stave off this unfortunate fall in crime? We need crime to look so bad and scary so the people will keep letting their governments spend disproportionate amounts of money imprisoning people for
TripWire's "Security News" Listing (Score:1)