This is great. More sharing between departments will help catch criminals faster.
When you say "criminals" you are probably thinking of strictly people who harm others, but the state is thinking of anybody who breaks its laws. Currently many of those laws exist solely to keep certain groups in power, and there is no guarantee it won't get even worse in the future.
Human law enforcement ensures layers of decisionmakers who are at least theoretically capable of empathy, and limited manpower makes them prioritize the worst or most flagrant crimes. Automated law enforcement gives a smaller group of people horrifyingly granular levels of control over all of society.
How many innocent people are caught with fingerprint data?
Also the William & Will West case was an older example of misidentifying by photography. Modern tech has improved dramatically and will get more and more precise. Why apply early 2000’s tech issues to the advancements made in the past 15-20 years?
https://news.sky.com/story/met-polices-facial-recognition-te...
Forensic “matching” of bullets to guns is basically pseudoscience, but continues to be used in court to convict people.
Roadside drug analysis kits are less useful than dowsing rods, but get people arrested on a daily basis. People that can’t afford bail, and plead guilty just to get back to their lives, despite the fact that an actual defense attorney would have had the case tossed in the trash.
Previous experience suggests that police tech does not just “get better.” They can’t even progress past “disproven pseudoscience.” And the innocent people that have their lives messed with while waiting for the tech to catch up might not be indifferent to the process.
It can, at best, match ammo from the same machine-manufactured batch to a factory-stock model of gun. It automatically fails on hand-load cartridges, or ammo that the analyst cannot readily source.
When there is a match, the prosecutor might say "this bullet was fired from this gun", but the science says "a bullet similar to the one in evidence was marked and deformed in a similar fashion, when fired by the weapon in evidence (just as it would with every other factory-stock copy of this model of gun)".
It's like matching a nail to the hammer that drove it. If the test nail is already different from the reference nail, you cannot match it. If you have two or more identical hammers, you can't tell which one drove the nail. The hammer factory made thousands of identical hammers.
In most cases, the tests are likely saying "the most commonly sold type of ammunition was fired from the most popular model of gun of that caliber". It's the sort of thing that should probably be used exclusively as exculpatory evidence. I.e. this model of gun always leaves distinctive markings, such as from an off-center diamond-shaped firing pin, or from an uncommon rifling twist, that were not found on the bullets in evidence, so the gun in evidence could not have fired them. Otherwise, a gun substantially similar, with all the same machine-made parts, could leave the same marks, so you could never know for sure which one fired the bullets.
The only time it would be useful to convict is if someone used a unique, hand-made, gunsmithed gun to fire factory-made ammunition. And the number of (violent) crimes committed with that type of display-piece gun approaches zero, because they tend to be both expensive and less fit for use as a weapon than cheaper factory-built guns.
All this tech makes a turnkey police state right there waiting. Who is going to turn that key before we dismantle it? Think of the children.
In the past, if a license plate was noted, you’d have to manually go through records. Now through automation and scale it’s instant. Should that be prohibited too?
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/27233798/ns/us_news-crime_and_cour...
> Commission President Anthony Pacheco said Friday that he was highly concerned after learning police have arrested at least two innocent people because of faulty fingerprint analysis.
How many guilty people were convicted based on true positives?
Seems you're willing to punish an innocent man and a guilty man just to make sure a committed crime is followed up with a conviction.
Why have such a low bar in 2019?
[1] http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?rec...
[2] https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12589/strengthening-forensic-sci...
>"There is some evidence that fingerprints are unique to each person, and it is plausible that careful analysis could accurately discern whether two prints have a common source, the report says. However, claims that these analyses have zero-error rates are not plausible; uniqueness does not guarantee that two individuals' prints are always sufficiently different that they could not be confused, for example. Studies should accumulate data on how much a person's fingerprints vary from impression to impression, as well as the degree to which fingerprints vary across a population. With this kind of research, examiners could begin to attach confidence limits to conclusions about whether a print is linked to a particular person."
Quite the stretch to go from "non-zero-error rates" to "made up pseudoscience" isn't it?
It's a problem if people are being convicted on fingerprint analysis alone. But as a piece of the puzzle, when combined with other evidence, what is the issue?
That's an odd criticism since nothing has a zero error rate.
DNA analysis has a non-zero error rate and we routinely rely on it.