London Police ‘Super Recognizer’ Walks Beat with a Facebook of the Mind
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm worried this might be another case of police over estimating how effective something is (like hair DNA forensics) to make arrests, with innocent people paying for it.
Using Palantir they can map all the celltower data, etc, to find people who are present at the place and time of multiple crimes. But they don't want to explain all this in court.
So they sit Constable Collins down with the video footage to parallel reconstruct evidence for the jury. And the PR department then decides to turn him into a super-hero with mythical powers, to further the cover.
That makes a lot more sense to me.
They explicitly state that they're after people who were filmed - just filmed - at the London riots a few years ago. They're looking to arrest them, and to extract damages from them.
At those riots, absolute worst case 10-20% of people will have stolen or smashed things, with most just rallying for justice. But that doesn't even matter. The vast majority of those people aren't criminals, and even of the ones that did commit criminal acts during those riots 99% aren't "regular criminals" (meaning any more disrespectful of laws than a bad landlord is, day-to-day).
But arresting these people will seriously impact their situation, their job, their prospects, and bring them a LOT closer to becoming criminals. And even the ones where it doesn't make them criminals, it will make them much more likely to riot again, for obvious reasons.
This is stupid, dangerous, and merely meant to make a few people in power feel good about themselves.
But here's the paragraph I'm talking about:
> Soft-spoken and gentle-mannered, Constable Collins carries a baton and pepper spray, but no gun. His weapon is his memory: Facial recognition software managed to identify one suspect of the 4,000 captured by security cameras during the London riots. Constable Collins identified 180.
Note the nice, round number. I wonder how that was established. Note that the sentence strongly implies that the only thing that makes these people suspect is being "captured by security cameras during the London riots". Those security cameras are pointed at streets, not shops, not office buildings, not private property, they couldn't have gotten a good look at the people who looted and burned.
This footage is very low quality: grainy 640x400 or less (cheap image sensors from around 2008, also the common resolution of the example images) black-and-white filmed in very bad lighting conditions at a distance of at least 6-7 meters (they hang those cameras up high), with most people on those cameras at at an average distance of 30 meters (my guess at half the distance between two of those security cameras from walking around in London). At that distance, a face is between 5x5 and 20x20 pixels.
You can't tell me they have less than 10% error rate. And of course, the subject given is black, and all the police officers mentioned are white. I'm not even implying racism here, people are notoriously bad at identifying members of other ethnic groups correctly. Example of footage here[1]) And aside from the people who were right next to the police, I doubt there were many assaults at all, though I'd expect a few.
But even if they do find the looters. They're not catching any reasonable percentage of them, they're just randomly punishing 4000 people : let's say they actually "catch" 2000 of them, and let's assume a 30% error rate (seems like the absolute minimum reasonable to me). So in effect, they're slapping jail on 660 innocents, and 1340 people who damaged property during a riot. Of the people who burned and looted, that 1340 is going to be, comparing with the numbers reported looting, somewhere between 2% and 5% of them.
The point is that this is going to be very bad for the social situation in London, and not going to change the fact that there's a very high chance that you can loot and get away with it during riots. It's all the bad, with none of the good.
[1] http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/criminalminds/images/7/7... http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/04/07/us-britain-bombing... http://i4.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article5828360.ece/ALTERNATE...
The chilling effect is real.
Looting and burning a city on a large scale, of course, will always be one of the remaining choices. Furthermore, the more miserable life part will provide extra incentive to do so.
It implies that they can and will dedicate that much time and power to put you on lists and possibly harass you for exercising your freedom of speech and assembly.
Given the relationship between the police and protesters, I wouldn't want to suffer the repercussions of being in their systems as one.
The result is that I'm less likely to become politically active out of fear of being identified and associated with subversives in the eyes of my government.
Also: why is being arrested such a big deal? You'll get mugshotted, swabbed, but unless CPS charge you (for which they need to believe they have a reasonable chance of a conviction), it's not going to show up in a background check.
EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_purpose
Also you don't need to be convicted of a crime in the UK to be given a record. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_caution
Secondly do you know anyone who's ever been questioned by the police? The situation when they offer you the caution is rather intimidating.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/mar/05/joint-enterpr...
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2014/03/31/case-study-...
There are a bunch of these.
In my country? Tons. And more people who have been arrested while being non-criminal in a demonstration, and then falsely accused of criminal behavior (and with stuff planted on them).
Sometimes that gets dispelled in court, othertimes there is even third-party footage showing police planting stuff on them.
And then there are police units in disguise coming out of police vans, merging with peaceful protesters, and inciting violence and damages to break a demonstration.
>why is being arrested such a big deal?
Depends on the country. In the UK, but several others too (including mine) you can be held without trial for months (up to a year or so actually), you can get beaten up in the police department, etc.
Oh, wait, it is useful for extorting motorists who stray into an unmarked "bus lane", but that's about it.
Of course, a million cameras running 24/7 produce an enormous amount of data, that just increases exponentially as quality improves. They can probably easily discard 90% of the footage with basic checks (is there anything besides the background visible), and use a smart compression algorithm, but still.
I'm generally okay with surveillance, but people should know the capabilities of what's already in place, and your comment seems to trivialise the powers they have.
If it had been a more serious crime (murder, rape) they would have looked for all the other security cameras in the area, and then worked out the route the criminal took to get to the crime scene and to get away from the crime scene.
The images they showed you were not good - but with a million cameras there's going to be variability in image quality and length of data storage.
This was what I always suspected pre-Snowden: that the government simply wasn't capable of creating a system to effectively monitor all internet traffic because they didn't have the technical chops. Which, in, say, 2001, might have been true.
Turned out all they needed was time and money and they had both and then once it was revealed that they could do it and actually do it rather well it came as a shock (to me, at least).
Two years ago was a long time in camera and facial recognition technology.
The police is pretty open about the legal powers they have and the technology they use.
And people have already been caught by facial recognition - the submitted article talks about it.
A woman was found stabbed to death outside her house, everyone who would have any reason to mean her harm had a reliable alibi.
Until the CCTV footage was analysed properly, and a suspicious car was found to have unique identifying marks. Further research of phone records revealed that in fact her husband was the primary architect of her murder and had orchestrated it with others.
CCTV was pivotal in detection and conviction. Nobody gives a shit about your phone or your tablet. People's lives matter, and one murderer caught is worth a thousand fines which would be overturned on appeal.
You do know that these "appeals" aren't free, right? Or guaranteed. If you happen to be of a paler complexion and of modest means, they can be had for the low, low cost of merely your job and everything you have. If you happen to be a poor minority, however...
Or have you heard it and are merely blind to how you are giving up essential liberty to purchase little temporary safety? "One good thing is worth a thousand bad things". How about that. I've never heard someone so elegantly crap all over their own argument.
It's more about the population feeling surveilled, as a means to not question power etc, than about helping solve crimes.
I don't like this journalistic BS trickery.
That he doesn't carry a gun is not some unique trait of him as implied here.
Most english policement DON'T carry guns (except in special units and circumstances) -- something that a lot of the US-based NYT readership wont know about.
Give it time.
I think the most interesting point about this is that the human mind doesn't know how the human mind does it.
I wonder what kind of software they compared to Constable Collins. Did that software use designed features or learned features? What sort of data set was it trained on?
It wouldn't surprise me if current state of the art software that learns features from real CCTV footage fared a lot better than what they were using in 2011.