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CNET: Police Are Using Facial Recognition For Minor Crimes, 'Because They Can' (cnet.com) 196

Posted by EditorDavid from the long-eye-of-the-law dept.
"Police often frame facial recognition as a necessary tool to solve the most heinous crimes, like terrorist attacks and violent assaults, but researchers have found that the technology is more frequently used for low-level offenses," reports CNET: In a recent court filing, the New York police department noted that it's turned to facial recognition in more than 22,000 cases in the last three years. "Even though the NYPD claims facial recognition is only used for serious crimes, the numbers tell a different story," said Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. "As facial recognition continues to grow, it's being routinely deployed for everything from shoplifting to graffiti."

Asked for comment, an NYPD spokeswoman pointed to a 2019 opinion article by police commissioner James O'Neill titled "How Facial Recognition Makes You Safer." In the piece, O'Neill talked about how facial recognition had been used to make arrests in murder, robbery and rape cases, but he didn't disclose how often it was used for low-level crimes. The department's facial recognition policy, established in March, allows the technology to be used for any crime, no matter the severity. Without any limits, police have more frequently used the technology for petty thefts than the dangerous crimes, privacy advocates say. Before Amazon put a moratorium on police use of its Rekognition face-identifying software, the program was used in a $12 shoplifting case in Oregon in 2018...

Without any limits, police can use facial recognition however they please, and in many cases, arrested suspects don't even know that the flawed technology was used... Attorneys representing protesters in Miami didn't know that police used facial recognition in their arrests, according to an NBC Miami report. Police used facial recognition software in a $50 drug dealing case in Florida in 2016 but made no mention of it in the arrest report.
The article also notes that as recently as this Tuesday, Hoan Ton-That, the CEO of facial recognition startup Clearview AI "said it isn't the company's responsibility to make sure its technology is being properly used by its thousands of police partners.

"Though the company has its own guidelines, Ton-That said Clearview AI wouldn't be enforcing them, saying that 'it's not our job to set the policy as a tech company...'"
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CNET: Police Are Using Facial Recognition For Minor Crimes, 'Because They Can' More

CNET: Police Are Using Facial Recognition For Minor Crimes, 'Because They Can'

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  • Why not use this to stop assholes? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Sunday October 25, 2020 @11:01PM (#60648616)

    The article tries to paint low level crime as if it's not worthy of being stopped.

    How many of you have been hit by low level crime though? Had a car window smashed to grab some $10 item and the window costs $100 (or more) to replace... but the effects of someone messing with your stuff last long after.

    Or "harmless" graffiti that blights the look of an area (most graffiti is tagging, not works of art) and costs shop owners real money to clean up.

    Or the shoplifter who is making is all pay more for everything just because they choose not to pay.

    I would argue that on the whole, these are the crimes that society should seek to end, should recognize who is responsible so they could be held accountable, and hopefully with consequences for being an asshole, change their ways.

    So why not facial recognition to catch the petty thief, and make the world a better place in the long run? Nothing serious has to happen to these people, but they need to be caught out and told what they are doing is wrong, and is hurting others.

    • When 100% of crime is punished, people will stop committing them unless its a crime of passion.

      • That sounds good (Score:3, Insightful)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 )
        until you realize that rioting is the last way for an oppressed people to make their voices heard. And if you can stop all rioting you can drastically increase the amount of oppression you inflict on a society.

        Good 'ole unintended consequences.

        • Re:That sounds good (Score:4, Funny)

          by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday October 26, 2020 @12:02AM (#60648728)

          until you realize that rioting is the last way for an oppressed people to make their voices heard.

          We could still have rioting, but confine it to arenas to minimize property damage. We could have teams and broadcast it as a spectator sport. Antifa vs Aryan Nation one weekend. The next weekend, BLM vs QAnon.

          They would all be able to make their voices heard, and the corporatists would love it because of the advertising revenue.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by LenKagetsu ( 6196102 )

          Destroying black homes, black businesses, black properties, and black schools in black neighborhoods when a black man gets shot only hurts black people.

      • When 100% of crime is punished and people stop committing them, politicians will pass laws to control your behavior.
        • There are already laws to control behavior, such as fines for speeding and trouble for stealing.

          • So? There's always room to get even worse behavioral control ones. I guess the current ones aren't too crazy or unreasonable in most cases.

          • And for not wearing a mask. And for having a gathering of more than ten people.

          • Re:Why not use this to stop assholes? (Score:5, Insightful)

            by fazig ( 2909523 ) on Monday October 26, 2020 @04:55AM (#60649340)
            Things usually can get a lot worse than they are.

            A popular argument of gun right advocates against gun control for example is implying a slippery slope and asking "where does it stop?"
            I'd ask the same here: Where does it stop?

            And by this I don't mean punishing crimes, we should punish crimes. The question is rather what kind of measures should we as a society accept that lead to punishing crimes. Do the ends justify the wider implications of the means that are used?
            Here I'd like to appeal to Blackstone's Ratio, a principle on which our Western societies are founded in order to not disturb the innocent too much in the name of catching every single criminal.
            Hence the issue becomes a question of "where does the surveillance stop?"
            After all you could use all those little justifications to gradually put surveillance into every single aspect of our lives, always parroting the "they already do it this and that way" combined with the also common "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" bullshit.


            Coming from Romania where we had the Securitate spy on everyone, disappearing people to never being seen again, and being ethnically German and learning about how secret polices like the Gestapo or Stasi or KGB spied on people and disappeared them as well, I'm a burnt child here.
            Seeing how people are cheering these means that historically have only lead to disaster in combination with authoritarianism (the path on which the US is right now) is quite disconcerting.

      • We'll never get to 100% even if we had an insane level police state. Worse, things will definitely go badly F'd trying to get to that 100%. Set the goal somewhere reasonable like around maybe 90 to 95% to avoid flipping to an evil state.

    • A friend of mine (Score:5, Interesting)

      by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Sunday October 25, 2020 @11:40PM (#60648684) Journal

      When I was a young teenager I had a friend named Jason.
      Jason was a "bad kid", always shoplifting, breaking into cars, etc. Once in while he got caught, but normally he didn't because cops don't spend much time investigating that stuff. (When the store manager caught him and told him to stop, Jason would just run, the manager isn't going to catch him and tackle him, in the vast majority of cases).

      Jason had one advantage he often used with cops and particularly judges - he was small. He was short because he inherited that from his dad, and because he started smoking before puberty. So when he was 14 years old he looked about 11. He'd get caught with some alcohol or weed, or shoplifting or whatever and he'd play this "little kid" act, coming across like a nine or ten year old. He kept getting away with everything, maybe getting a few hours of community service, if anything.

      When Jason was 18, after four or five years of getting away with "petty crimes", he committed first degree murder. He had learned that he always gets away with committing crimes.

      I wish Jason had been caught and learned that crime doesn't pay when he was shoplifting. The system waited until he committed first degree murder before anyone did anything, before he learned that crime doesn't pay.

      • I guess the system, and everyone around him, treated him like he was only a lad [youtu.be].

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by antdude ( 79039 )

        Are you still a friend of this Jason? :P

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Say Jason had been caught and punished more harshly. Time in a facility, or maybe a record after he turned 18.

        How do you think that would have affected his life? What kind of people would he meet in the facility, what effect would having a record have on his job prospects?

        It would have been best for everyone if there had been an intervention, someone there to set him on the right path and help turn his life around. Maybe he lacked good role models, maybe he had problems at home. All things that can be addre

        • > Say Jason had been caught and punished more harshly. Time in a facility, or maybe a record after he turned 18.

          > How do you think that would have affected his life? What kind of people would he meet in the facility, what effect would having a record have on his job prospects?

          I think three months in jail for burglary would.have affected his job prospects a lot less than twenty-two years in prison for murder did.

          That bears repeating. I think three months in jail for burglary would.have affected his job

          • A person with an antisocial personality disorder can't be helped. Three months in jail would have had a contraproductive effect - it would have taught him to hide his tracks better so the murder investigation would have been more difficult.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            My point, which TBH I thought was obvious, is that instead of pumping money into policing and prisons it would be better to spend it on social services. That's how you get the best outcome for everyone.

    • So why not facial recognition to catch the petty thief, and make the world a better place in the long run? Nothing serious has to happen to these people, but they need to be caught out and told what they are doing is wrong, and is hurting others.

      It is only a matter of time before effective facial recognition becomes a standard feature on high-performance cameras, or can easily be implemented using external software on existing cameras (just as license plate recognition functionality can be added).

      Once that

    • I have no problem with this if the community agrees. There's always a risk of a cop losing his shit and unjustifiably shooting a PoC, So if enforcing the law does not make the community safer (graffiti / shoplifting), there's a good chance it will make the community less safe. This is obviously more true in black communities than white ones.

      I hope we can all agree that graffiti / shoplifting should not be met with deadly force (though I realize a few here will disagree).

  • So? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cygnusvis ( 6168614 ) on Sunday October 25, 2020 @11:08PM (#60648632)

    Police used facial recognition software in a $50 drug dealing case in Florida in 2016 but made no mention of it in the arrest report.

    So what? The found the identity of person who did it, and then was able to connect them to the crime with traditional evidence. This is the way things are SUPPOSED to work. If police were saying "the computer says its her, so GUUILTY" then id have a problem.

    • Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Monday October 26, 2020 @03:29AM (#60649190)

      Police used facial recognition software in a $50 drug dealing case in Florida in 2016 but made no mention of it in the arrest report.

      So what? The found the identity of person who did it, and then was able to connect them to the crime with traditional evidence. This is the way things are SUPPOSED to work. If police were saying "the computer says its her, so GUUILTY" then id have a problem.

      NOT forcing police to reveal their tactics and sources, has opened that shit for rampant abuse, which they repeatedly deny, and yet basically no police agency will produce a policy that polices, audits, or monitors basically any of this modern tech. Mix one part FISA court with two parts Stingray ISMI catchers, and you end up with a wicked cocktail called parallel construction. I will let you infer as to how legal or constitutional that is, which IS the problem here.

      Perhaps this will become more clear to you when your defense attorney can't even tell you HOW you ended up being labeled a criminal after you've been falsely accused of a crime, because police departments will soon not have enough resources to bother with listening to anything but what "the computer says". Good luck with your defense. Got $10K laying around to go have "fun" with defending your life and freedom? 99.999% of innocent people sure don't.

      • Perhaps this will become more clear to you when your defense attorney can't even tell you HOW you ended up being labeled a criminal after you've been falsely accused of a crime,

        I'm not convinced by your argument, because you're ignoring the trial part of the judicial exercise. The GP specifically mentions that the police identified the culprit via face recognition, but then they collected the evidence they needed to convict via regular police procedures. If the police found this evidence, then it's not a case of false accusation; and if they didn't, then the person wouldn't have been convicted of a crime (for the sake of this argument, I'll ignore the usual accusations of framing,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Facial recognition is both an extremely powerful and unreliable tool.

      You might not see a problem with this, but someone who keeps getting harassed by the police because their shitty facial recognition software doesn't work might.

      Reminds me of that guy who lived in the geographic centre of the United States. Cops kept turning up because people's "find my phone" could only locate their device to the nearest country, and then gave the coordinates of the mid point.

  • Why don't they solve the massive percent of murder (40%) and home invasion rapes that go unsolved (at least test the rape kits FFS). I get it though, it's a lot easier to catch a petty criminal. -- lower energy requirement for reward.

    • You can understand why a person committing a crime in public store (such as theft) is easy to get video on versus a home invasion rape or alleyway murder.

    • Why don't they solve the massive percent of murder (40%) and home invasion rapes that go unsolved

      Are those cases actually solveable?

      • Probably not when you give up so easily, don't deploy resources efficiently, and only use surveillance to solve candy bar thefts. Maybe we need better street surveillance coverage .. but if it's being used for petty harassment rather than solving major crimes the public won't want to trade their privacy for that. Again, they don't even bother to DNA test most rape kits, which costs like $100 at most .. that shows they aren't interested .. my guess is that a little investigative work and better surveillance

    • Criminals don't start with murder and rape. They start with petty crime.

      If we could solve and prosecute more petty crime, perhaps some of these people would be stopped before they graduate to rape and murder.

  • Is it worth it? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Sunday October 25, 2020 @11:30PM (#60648666)

    Do we really want to catch these low level criminals? Yay you caught one, now we have to put them in Felony University (prison) for $85K per year (California) (a year at the Hilton hotel costs more btw).. meanwhile violent criminals run amok. Sorry but I don't see petty thieves costing the economy $85K per year that we spend putting them in jail. Better off giving them drug rehab, a job, empathy classes, or enrolling them in trade school so they won't have to steal.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by cygnusvis ( 6168614 )
      The issue is that if you dont stop petty theft, it will happen more often and people will take business else ware, or stop doing business. Frankly, there is a real danger in the USA right now of communities turning to their own (vigilante) justice if police don't stop crime.

    • Re:Is it worth it? (Score:5, Informative)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday October 26, 2020 @12:15AM (#60648750)

      Do we really want to catch these low level criminals? Yay you caught one, now we have to put them in Felony University (prison)

      Very few first-time shoplifters go to prison or even jail.

      A fine and/or community service is typical.

    • You do not go 'prison' for petit theft, as is not a felony. That is what the 'petit' part refers to, which is generally what shoplifting is. The point is *not* that we are wasting resources locking up small time criminals (though we definitely are - it accomplishes little beyond alternative punishments), the point is we are cranking the surveillance society up to 11 in the name of bringing to justice people whose crime consists of stealing a Mars bar and a box of condoms.

    • I am something of a prison reformer. When somebody commits petty crimes like shoplifting or car jacking, you first of all try to get them to stop that silliness, and get a proper job, or whatever. I think the point made by many in this thread is that allowing idiots to get away with petty crimes may then lead to a criminal mentality; that you can get away with bad stuff, because you do not get caught. Then eventually, the crimes get bad enough that the criminal is sent to jail. But by then, it is far too la

  • The tool is dangerous because of its potential (Score:4, Interesting)

    by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Sunday October 25, 2020 @11:56PM (#60648710)

    Facial recognition, tracking the wide range of very broad surveillance technologies are a concern because of their potential, not because of what they are doing now. We have the technology to monitor and record almost everyone almost all of the time. We are approaching a time when this vast database can be automatically scanned for "bad" behaviors, with only a small amount of human interaction needed for verification.

    The technology can be used for good - to stop crimes, sometimes really horrible crimes. In a world with total surveillance people can feel safe - except from the people who control the surveillance.

    The potential is there to turn that surveillance machine against the public. To rapidly find and arrest everyone who might cause trouble when an authoritarian regime takes over.

    Nuclear weapons are not inherently bad, they are just devices. There are even some potentially positive uses, but I darn well don't want my local police department to have nukes.

    • To rapidly find and arrest everyone who might cause trouble when an authoritarian regime takes over.

      in the 40s authoritarian regimes took over without issue and without advanced tech. Also, a mask (now widely available and acceptable to wear any ware) and tinted glasses will fool the recognition anyway.

    • The potential is there to turn that surveillance machine against the public. To rapidly find and arrest everyone who might cause trouble when an authoritarian regime takes over.

      The point is to avoid allowing an authoritarian regime to take over. There are numerous tools that an authoritarian regime can use to increase its power, such as corrupting the rule of law, controlling the free press, persecuting dissidents, and so on. All been done. Surveillance technology is not evil as such. Trivially, it is not much worse than a curtain-twitching old biddy, reporting on her neighbor's supposed misdeeds. But from what I have read of oppressive regimes, this neighborly nosiness can become

  • If police can enforce lower crimes more efficiently, it frees up more resources to solve more crimes, including higher crimes. If the police can catch a porch pirate in just few hours time instead of days, win-win for everyone. If majority of society doesn't want police to enforce certain laws, legalize the activity. Don't want to catch $50 drug deals, make drug deals below some threshold legal. Don't want police catching porch thieves, legalize it if you can (see how many residents will vote for it). Other

  • The Problems With This (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ytene ( 4376651 ) on Monday October 26, 2020 @04:22AM (#60649272)
    When cygnusvis writes,

    "Someone shoplifted $12 worth of stuff, and they were caught by police, what's the problem? BTW if you imply it effects minorities more, then your admitting that minorities commit more crimes, not something I would want to be caught thinking."

    they are, wittingly or unwittingly, making the narrow argument that police forces wantthe public to make and/or accept when thinking about the idea of using CCTV for minor crimes. What law enforcement are doing is a con trick, designed specifically to rob citizens of their rights - and the most painful part is that it is easy to "go along" with their arguments. But here are a few reasons why this change should be stopped, now.

    1. Presumption of Innocence
    CCTV and facial recognition are "trawler net" technologies. They sweep up everyone in a given location [within the field of vision of the camera] and process them without oversight. We are told in western society that we have "nudus cum nuda iacebat" - the right to the presumption of innocence until we are proven guilty. Yet the way that these cameras are designed to assume that everyone is guilty.

    2. Data Quality
    Although a different field of policing, just consider "breathalyzer testing" for suspected drunk-drivers. As a NY Times article revealed [nytimes.com], "Judges in Massachusetts and New Jersey have thrown out more than 30,000 breath tests in the past 12 months alone, largely because of human errors and lax governmental oversight. Across the country, thousands of other tests also have been invalidated in recent years.". In other words, there is a risk that the legal system will simply and blindly follow "the computer says so", which hardly seems like a recipe for fair and blind justice.

    3. Mis-Use
    How many times have you heard or read or seen a story about a law enforcement officer abusing the power of their office. A parent who decides he doesn't like his daughter's boyfriend starts to run checks on them. When those "checks" are just to see if the guy has a criminal record it's one thing, but suppose the officer/father could feed that person's likeness in to a facial recognition register and get a summary of all the times and places that person had been caught on camera. For facial recognition to be effective, it has to keep that data for extended periods.

    4. Ineffective
    One of the most important points to note is that CCTV and facial recognition are not directly "preventative measures" or able to "discourage" crime, because they can only ever have value aftera crime is committed. The Boston Marathon Bombers [cnn.com] were caught after CCTV footage analysis. But please follow this link to the CNN article and take a look at a cleaned up frame from a CCTV feed, purporting to show one of the bombers on the day. Can you see the bomber? Can you recognize them? How confident would you be to convict someone based on this image?

    5. Coercive
    Stores have CCTV and active guards because they are concerned about shoplifting, but in the case of a more serious crime, police can demand all the recorded footage and take it away for whatever use they deem appropriate. If/when more widespread acceptance of facial recognition becomes effective, the police/law enforcement are going to demand that all private CCTV networks link to their central "recognition database" in real time.

    At what point in this process will citizens point out that this level of intrusion and state surveillance far exceeds anything that the notorious Stasi [wikipedia.org] had in Eastern Germany. Those that remember the Stasi at the height of their power will recall the way that western governments, like Washington, London, Paris, Madrid, etc., all told their citizens, "See! We're not like those horrible Stasi! H

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Acron ( 1253166 )

      I think your points are going to run into problems with property ownership and public space expectations. If you take your clothes off in the middle of a public park, you have no expectation of a right of privacy. If you do so in a bathroom in your house, you do. It can get trickier on someone else's property, but I suspect the law has stabilized expectations in that arena as well, i.e. you can expect privacy in a bathroom, but not on the main floor of a business. Employers have certain rights and restr

    • That the wrong person might be arrested has nothing to do with the presumption of innocence. The presumption of innocence means you are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. It does mean you are unarrestable until proven guilty. If the police are as lazy as you assume it still has to get past the prosecutor, your own defence lawyer, and the judge before you are found guilty. This system isn't putting the presumption of innocence at risk.

  • I don't see any problems with that, as long as the identification is used as an extra tool and not solely relied on, so the identification by the AI should be checked and rechecked by humans.. It's not any different from going manually through a book with headshots, only much faster..
    BUT if they rely solely on the identification and it isn't checked by a (sensible) human, THAN it's a problem..

  • Or showing images on the news asking if anyone recognizes this person to contact authorities? It might actually be more accurate.

    But even if it is more accurate it should not be taken as proof. We've seen it fail to accurately identify people as regularly as eye-witnesses do. Being falsely accused is a greater crime than petty theft, IMO.

    The Trial [wikipedia.org] made a big impression on me, I guess. Okay, he didn't shoplift. We never even found out what he was accused of if I remember right.

  • When people are giving off about how face mask are gov control just remind them it completely breaks facial recognition and watch as their mind clashes with itself.
  • It is the false positives that I want to avoid. I want to avoid the cops having a database of all the places I have gone. If the camera sees you, it stores that info FOREVER. Something happens, you were nearby, but had not told your wife. When the cops show up to question you, your wife will get pissed. If you think the cop's database won't be hacked, you are a fool. They know you eat out every Thursday, your house is now a target every Thursday.

  • Actually, I have difficulty controlling my own mind, so fuck knows how the police are going to do that. I don't need no stinking tinfoil hat. Anyway, it isn't tin any more, it is aluminium. You have to keep up with the times, you know.

    Oh! here is nurse Jemima, with my pills. Good tits, but I am not allowed to say that at my age.

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