AI Is Getting Better at Detecting Handguns
vocativ.com
vocativ.com
And then
> Overall, the optimized model achieved 84% accuracy, with zero false negatives [...] and 57 false positives.
So in the what-if scenario above, 16% of cases would falsely escalate a situation dramatically? Seems like a horrible idea. And "really good" seems like a stretch.
This is preliminary work but it wouldn't be useful to have an alarm go off every time another police officer or security guard comes into view with a gun on his hip.
That said, I don't think police would want it if it might increase the risk to their lives.
MTBF: Even small guns produce recoil, which over time will damage or degrade any electronics built into the firing mechanism.
Security: if a "computer" of whatever complexity is controlling the firing of the gun it presents surface area both for attacks and bugs.
Rank and file acceptance: No officer will want to go into the field with a service weapon fitted with "safety restrictions" or "casualty reduction mechanisms" other than the trigger safety.
The training guns could be separate. Surely the "on-duty" guns are not being fired often enough that this will be an issue at all... right? Right??
If officer's don't have to potentially gun someone down because they made a hectic movement 84% of the time, that's a pretty big win.
Imagine 84% of " black guy mysteriously died" actually led to convictions of officers because their ai thing told them "definitely no gun, bro"
I imagine that, like body cameras, the AI thing will, in those events, conveniently be deactivated, malfunctioning, misplaced, or have it's records lost.
How many? Because apparently we haven't yet reached it with body cams.
Like I know?
But if you compound different systems, like the ai handgun thing and dont store the data in the same place, it becomes exponentially less likely that suddenly 2 critical systems failed at the same important moment for some reason.
the real issue with police brutality is the fact that it is, in fact, legal, and police is trained to respond in such a way. what protesters get wrong about police brutality is that its supposedly illegal. it is not. most instances of police killing someone are actually legal. which doesn't make it right. but its legal. saying somethings illegal when its not just makes you look like an idiot.
people need to protest for better laws, not getting individual cops sentenced, because that wont ever happen with any kind of regularity.
Unless you just basically want a drug-sniffing dog, for guns. That is, something to "scienceify" something that would otherwise be problematic (searching this car, or shooting that suspect).
"Hey judge, the DOG said it, it must be true!"
"Hey judge, the COMPUTER said it, it must be true!"
This headline shouldn't be tolerated here.
>For the experiments, we selected 30 scenes from the previously used videos with the next requirements. Each scene is made up of at least 5 frames, filmed in a fixed scenario, i.e., in the same place, and the pistols are clearly visible to a human viewer. ... The model successfully detects the pistol in 27 scenes with an average time interval AATpI=0.2 seconds, which is good enough for an alarm system. The detector fails to detect pistols only in three scenes.
I am probably particularly picky but (from the paper):
>This section analyzes the performance of our best detection model on seven public videos, with low qualities, downloaded from youtube. Six of them are pieces of well known films from the 90s, James Bon: The World is Not Enough (video 1), 3 pieces from Pulp Fiction (video 2, 3 and 4), Impossible Mission: Rogue Nation (video 5) and Mister Bin (video 6). The seventh video is a long pistol threatening video (video 7).
... if you cannot spell Bond or Mister Bean, and you classify Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation as a 90's movie (calling it Impossible Mission) you don't look like having been particularly accurate when writing the article, if the same accurateness is in the actual numbers, there is a problem.
Anyway the "final" sample (30 scenes) is so small that it makes very little sense to derive anything from it.
Why are we even bothering with spending money trying to create technology like this? How often do banks actually get robbed anymore by gun-wielding maniacs? And how often do officers actually die in the line of duty by getting shot by armed citizens? This is the more frequent case than the bank robbery, and even that is exceedingly rare. Only ~140 officers died on the job in 2016 and of those only 64 died from being shot. Factor in that even in a fair amount of circumstances when they know someone is armed they still end up getting shot and that number of preventable deaths (in theory) gets even lower.
What I always find strange is the obsession with "officer safety". Being a cop isn't even one of the top 10 most dangerous jobs in the country, statistically speaking. It's far more dangerous to be in logging, farming, construction, fishing, transportation, etc. And that's comparing the numbers for a very high year like 2016. In 2013 the number of officer deaths was less than half of 2016 - only 31 cops died from being shot - out of ~900,000 officers in the nation.
This kind of thing is just a colossal waste of money.
"Systems like these still have a ways to go, especially since those false alarms could have deadly consequences for civilians being approached by body camera-wielding cops."
That's the biggest issue I have with this. This will become a new reason for them to detain and probably stop and frisk. "The device alerted me to a possible threat" - this will be the excuse and this will lead to reduced rights because the courts will, of course, consider it "reasonable suspicion" based on the technology. There will also be no incentive to increase accuracy since interacting with more citizens makes/catches more criminals, which means numerically they are doing a better job.
I don't think it has to do with the numbers exactly. If you are a skilled logger and don't make any mistakes, you are likely pretty safe. As a skilled cop, without any mistakes, your life can still be in jeopardy at the drop of a hat. No amount of safety gear can protect a cop from someone pulling a knife or other weapon with intent to harm either the cop or an innocent civilian.
I think there is also the aspect that cops are public servants. It's compassion that makes me want to keep these folks alive who are voluntarily taking risks to protect me and my community.
I think the numbers are also not totally representative - are all 'cops' lumped in together for the statistic about job safety? Does that include detectives doing mostly office or investigative work? Does it include officers writing parking tickets? Does it blend cops patrolling the suburbs with cops patrolling inner cities?
I don't have any sources about my claims here, I don't really know a lot about the dangers of logging or the statistics about the dangers of being a cop.
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What bothers me the most about this is that visual presence of a firearm is immediately associated with criminal behavior or intent.
Totally agree that the mere presence of a gun being an alarm bell of sorts is the biggest issue here.
The reason I have no issue with open carry is that it 1) makes the weapon more quickly accessible should it be needed and 2) it acts as a deterrent. I think having a gun visible to any possible violent criminals would make them far less likely to choose that individual than one who may or may not be concealing it in their pant leg, purse, backpack, etc.
In fact, those two reasons are exactly why cops open carry when on duty. They need to have quick access just in case shit goes down and it makes people think twice (and then a third and fourth time) if they see an armed officer - how likely is it that someone is going to try to assault a cop and escape arrest if they could be shot in ~1 second?
Police by nature cannot be everywhere at all times. Even in dense cities it is not realistic to expect an officer to be able to respond within 30 seconds - a length of time that means the world when it comes to violent crime, whether it involves a gun or not. The further out you go from the dense cities the longer the response time, making it even more critical to have protection for yourself. This is the entire reason why the second amendment exists - to be able to protect yourself when the government cannot enforce and defend your rights for you.
I'm pretty sure this has been thoroughly debunked. The only thing that carrying a weapon does is make it more likely that someone will die if an incident occurs. Not only because now there's a gun involved, but also because if the criminal's victims are armed with guns, then the criminal is going to be armed with a gun too.
> In fact, those two reasons are exactly why cops open carry when on duty.
What cops do and don't do is pretty much irrelevant to talking about the general public. They actually have the legal authority to do things like shoot people, or just to arrest them in general, meaning the presence of a cop (armed or otherwise) acts as a deterrent to crime already.
> This is the entire reason why the second amendment exists - to be able to protect yourself when the government cannot enforce and defend your rights for you.
No, the second amendment exists because it dates to when militias were common (in fact it explicitly mentions militias). I believe it was also meant as an escape hatch to allow another revolution if the US government got out of hand (which comes back to the whole militia thing). It was not intended as a deterrent for ordinary crime.
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/cdc-study-use-firearms-s...
The CDC concluded that it is an important deterrent to crime and found consistently lower injury rates for armed citizens compared with victims who used other defense methods (or had no defense method at all).
What cops do is absolutely not irrelevant in this regard. I would like to remind you that ordinary citizens can usually legally detain and physically restrain a criminal and can perform a citizen's arrest when they witness a felony crime in progress. What better way to do that than with a gun? Also, any person can legally apply lethal force if their life is in jeopardy. Cops are granted the extra benefit of being able to apply lethal force when someone else's life is in jeopardy and theirs is not.
Yes, a crucial reason behind the second amendment was to maintain the ability to fight against a tyrannical government. Another reason is the ability to fight on behalf of your government on an as-needed, short-notice type of scenario. The third main reason is what I mentioned - self-defense. The threats of that time were much greater - angry Brits that we snubbed, Native Americans that we killed, wild animals, etc. Plus the need to hunt. Being armed was a necessity. It was so obvious, that I think that part didn't even get mentioned in the second amendment. However, later on a number of states added specific state constitutional provisions that secured the right to "bear arms in defense of themselves and the state". These provisions usually included an element of self/personal defense as well as the state or "common defense". These are separate things. A very clear example is Colorado - "The right of no person to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person and property, or in aid of the civil power when thereto legally summoned, shall be called in question; but nothing herein contained shall be construed to justify the practice of carrying concealed weapons."
Please also keep in mind that since the constitution trumps all other laws (federal, state, etc.), all other laws that are passed must conform to the constitution to be considered legal and valid. Colorado's language is extremely clear and plain. It has never been overturned or deemed unconstitutional. This therefore means that the second amendment must contain the right to personal self-defense not in service of the nation. And it should be clear based on these state provisions that were all passed that it was clearly a major element.
No, it just means the second amendment doesn't prohibit that.
God I can already imagine it! "Drop the gun! Drop the gun! Pop pop pop"
Can't drop what you aren't holding.
There are some criminals that get rich from armed robbery, but your typical armed bank robber has a short and none-too-lucrative career:
http://www.businessinsider.com/people-are-robbing-banks-in-r...
https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2013/04/26/bank_robbers...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/04/where-...
Yes - although almost none of them have the technical expertise to manufacture a gun and yet significant number of criminals own them. Similarly criminals don't need the expertise to own a "gun obfuscating device" to own one.