Bayes' theorem strikes again. Even if the odds of a false positive are only 1 in 1000, if 1 in a million are criminals then out of 1000 flagged people only 1 might be a criminal.
If yours isn't already as bad as ours, then just wait.
The iniquities of pre-trial detention and cash bail are fixable. Racially biased arrest, conviction and sentencing rates are fixable. Needlessly punitive sentences and an over-reliance on incarceration are fixable. Miscarriages of justice due to pseudoscientific forensic evidence and under-funded public defenders are fixable.
Don't make the UK out to be some paradise (legal or otherwise), it struggles with plenty of its own problems.
The UK is far from perfect, but most of the criticisms of the American criminal justice system simply don't apply.
The intentional homicide rate is substantially lower in the UK (1.2 vs 5.35 per 100,000), as is our rate of killings by law enforcement (0.2 vs 30.4 per 10,000,000). The UK may have slightly more property crime (12.2% vs 10% of population victimised), but it's not clear if that comparison is statistically valid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Proper...
In the UK, it seems, almost everyone has a tale about when they were burgled, when they were mugged or when their car was broken into.
Is this so in other countries, I think not?
Are you a WASP? I guess you're safe in US.
Are you black, latin american, native american, foreigner? I'm quite sure you are safer outside of the US.
It still takes 2-3 years to get to trial for serious offences during which time your name and face are plastered all over the papers (at least locally).
Mounting a successful defence can cost 10s to 100s of thousands of pounds.
Fighting off charges of which you are innocent is not fun. If we assume that the UK's system is good enough to just increase the arrest rate and it will all come out in the wash this would destroy many people's lives.
Although it is clear that the cuts have significantly impacted family, immigration and welfare benefits cases, it is not clear that they have affected the fairness of the criminal legal system.
Police have always relied on facial recognition, just not facial recognition carried out by machines. We accept imperfect facial recognition from machines if it is faster, and leaves less work for humans to deal with.
I've yet to meet a customer who's looking at this technology as a way to make decisions. In every case it's there to help make their analysts' jobs easier, by sifting through the chaff and presenting them with the data that makes the best use of their skills.
Note: I work for AWS.
Around 15 years ago I would often schedule last minute flights while traveling for work. When I did, I almost certainly would receive an enhanced screening from TSA. I was the false positive, and when traveling on tight schedules, I was not amused at the frequency in which I was considered suspect (in contrast to the treatment from the airlines, who treated me like royalty). Of course, TSAs true positive rate is 0%.
There are two big assumptions you haven't made explicit. One, that the FN rate is low. If it isn't you haven't necessarily improved your SNR at all, you're just spent resources looking in the wrong place. Two, that the cost of a FP is 0. The latter obviously isn't true, so you have to weight the positive and negative impacts across all scenarios before you can tell if this is a net win.
Think of this in a different context; say I have a new cancer screening protocol, with a low FN but also a high FP rate. So everyone we mark as positive gets a follow up biopsy. You say "great, we catch x% more cancers now than the old way, good win". Until someone points out that biopsies have a y% rate of catastrophic infection resulting in death. Depending how these rates balance out, we may be killing more people that we are saving....
This is a highly black-and-white way of thinking about the implications. "Heck, it's only a problem if they get executed."
For example, roadside drug test accuracy rate is abysmal but innocent people are being put in jail because uninformed LEO either don't know or don't care baout the rate. If you can't afford to fight the false charge, your life/record/job/etc is screwed.
Also, these false positives tend to have a conveniently racist default twist in our country.
"59% of the Houston defendants in drug arrests involving false positives were black.", I expect the number that didn't fight the charge and were wrongfully convicted is quite high as well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/magazine/how-a-2-roadside...
I'd say a society is more successful the more they strive to minimize law enforcement contact.
Friendly reminder that our _entire_ legal system was arranged by the Founders so that innocent people wouldn’t be incarcerated even if that means some guilty people walk free.
Your reasoning flips the most important feature of our criminal justice system on its head.
I know most people on HN haven’t dealt with the criminal justice system but being wrongly charged and, if you’re lucky, beating the charges is an incredibly awful experience. Just being charged will follow you for the rest of your life.
Remember this is used by police to find suspects, not to replace the judge.
It means that just looking at a picture, 2 suspects every ten are successfully recognized
Compared to the system we have now, were to find who's guilty police have to go trough a list of suspects were all of them except one (or a few) is innocent, 2 every 10 is very good.
We're not talking about considering people guilty until proven innocent, but helping police to investigate in the right direction.
In UK almost a quarter of murder cases are still unsolved.
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/almost-quarter-all-murders-are-sti...
It means you have to explain the arrest on any enhanced DBS you need.
It means you probably longer qualify for visa free travel to the US and will need to ask the US embassy if you have to get a visa or not.
Seriously though, for anyone interested in understanding this interesting statistical principle, check out the "Intuitive Explanation of Bayes Theorem" [1]
[1]: https://betterexplained.com/articles/an-intuitive-and-short-...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_London_Under...
He presents useful tools for everyday people to understand this, mostly by converting percentages to real numbers and drawing probability trees.
NYC population is 8.6 million in 2017, so there are only 8~9 criminals in NYC? Wow.
Come on, you should give a much better estimate.
Once police have the right to search, enter, confiscate. and arrest probable cause is out the window.
I suppose it could be worse and they just take an aggregate face of all (accused?) criminals or for particular crimes (white collar?) and match against that... hey your skin was brown, or hey you didn't shave... you appear Male.