Me to cop: That's him you can see him breaking into the car here at 10:15, then at 12:05 we have a perfect clear view of his face.
Cop: We can't really do anything with this, I mean we can take the copy of the video but we don't have any way to identify him.
Me: So we can't really do anything?
Cop: Yep sorry
> Cop: Yep sorry
So let's add a face recognition database. Now, two possibilities.
One is they've got the DMV database or some other mass database with photos of millions of people. They run your video through and it comes back with 117 matches. They all look like your guy, because that's what facial recognition is, so which one is it? Still no way to tell. And that's assuming the perpetrator was actually in the database.
The other possibility is that they're only using something like mugshot photos. Now it's only thousands of people in the database, so they only get one match. Hurray, we've caught him! Except that it could still have been any of the other 116 people who weren't in the smaller database. Or any of thousands of people from out of state or other countries who aren't even in the bigger database. So now we're going to go convict this guy because he's the only suspect and we've got a video of somebody who looks like him, even though he probably wasn't even the perpetrator.
Notice that this is only a problem for justice systems that want to be justice systems. If all you want is a pound of flesh from some random schmoe to demonstrate that you're catching bad guys even though you're not, it works great. Same if you're an authoritarian dictatorship, because then you can murder all 117 matches and to heck with all this hard work of making sure we found the right person. Which is why mass surveillance does more harm than good.
Or, they just store the info, and when the same petty criminal pops up again with a similar crime, as is often the case, also track the particulars of this one to see if they get a match and add that to the prosecution list.
Kind of like cell phone tracking. There's hundreds of phones in the vicinity of any one bank robbery, but when you get one that is in the vicinity of all three, probably a good idea to investigate the owner of that one...
Maybe if you're a local politician, a cop or rich enough for them to know who you are you'll get that kind of service. For everyone else they'll just do nothing or nearly nothing and go back to playing with that APC they don't need.
If they find your car as part of some other crime they'll add another page to the book they're throwing but you don't need a database to do that.
Which is how you get false convictions, because you're starting with a list of essentially random people, with no guarantee that the true perpetrator is even on it.
Then you ping cell phone records, and the actual perpetrator left their phone at home because they knew they'd be committing a crime, but one person out of a hundred on your list of random people happened to be in the area at that time, and that combined with what looks like their face on video is enough to convince a jury. Or convince the accused that a jury would be convinced so they'll plead guilty to a crime they didn't commit.
> Or, they just store the info, and when the same petty criminal pops up again with a similar crime, as is often the case, also track the particulars of this one to see if they get a match and add that to the prosecution list.
So you get another video with the same face matching the same hundred odd people, which increases the chances that one of the other random people on the list was in the vicinity of at least one of the crimes while the actual perpetrator always leaves their phone at home, and now the innocent party gets convicted of multiple counts.
> Kind of like cell phone tracking. There's hundreds of phones in the vicinity of any one bank robbery, but when you get one that is in the vicinity of all three, probably a good idea to investigate the owner of that one...
Then it turns out to be the alarm tech or insurance adjuster or regional bank manager responding to the robbery, or some company that always makes deposits on Friday around 3PM which is also when the robbery crew always robs the banks. Which makes it a lot easier to choose any of those parties as a scapegoat if you can't find who really did it.
Computers are really good at finding random coincidences in large data sets. Humans are really bad at not interpreting that kind of noise as signal.
Yes if you can narrow it down to 100 people and then further confirm their identity with DNA or other real evidence that is potentially useful (and only potentially... It may waste your time). But for any sort of petty crime it seems like it will almost always do more harm than good.
No, that's not the real question. The real question is how frequently such people would even exist in the first place, which is what I was asking. We're not trying to find solutions to non-problems here.
Especially since there may be a genetic component of people looking the same. Chasing down all the Smiths in your neighborhood can increase the rates of false detection.
That's going to depend a lot on how stringently you define "in the area" and "the time of the crime" as well as things like population density and demographics. For example, if the perpetrator is a particular race and so consequently are all the facial recognition matches, and the state's population has particular races concentrated in particular areas, expect that to affect the probability in a way that leads to more false positives all around, because it's then effectively the case that people with similar faces tend to live near each other.
But the really perfidious thing about all this is that it's not just facial recognition and cell phone matches. Suppose the chance of a random person out of a hundred with a similar face being in the same area is "only" 5%. That would be the case if there were around 500 people in the vicinity (not unusual in an urban area) in a state with a million people, and then around 5% of your convicted criminals would be innocent.
But we're not just checking faces and cell phones, we also check all kinds of things like internet history, family and work connections, financial and purchasing history, etc.
Then we come to find out that one of the facial recognition matches did a web search for Halloween masks in October of last year and the co-conspirators whose faces we don't have were wearing masks, and the same person has a low paying job, a fair amount of debt and a second cousin with a twenty year old conviction for marijuana possession, and the cousin's cell phone was in the vicinity of the crime.
It's a pile of circumstantial nonsense. It's all selection bias and dependent variables. Everybody searches for Halloween masks around Halloween. Each of your hundred odd facial recognition matches has a hundred odd family members, there were a few hundred people in the vicinity, you start multiplying numbers like that and you get coincidence matches. The random cousin who hangs out in the same areas as crimes are committed is not unlikely to have a checkered past.
But all the jury sees is a huge pile of evidence. Which gets bigger the more mass surveillance there is, independent of guilt or innocence, because more surveillance can uncover more coincidences. (And then they pick up your cousin and find drugs on him again, and suddenly he's testifying against you for a lesser sentence even though you haven't even seen him in five years.)
I would not want to be in your situation, but the needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few.
I've seen a mugging in Brazil. They are so frequent there that everyone I talked to has been mugged on the street. Friends of mine have been carjacked and kidnapped for 8 hours.
The police won't investigate a mugging. You're wasting your time to report it.
Let's not "accept" crimes that we think are not serious. All crime needs to be investigated and appropriate punishment given. Living in a society where some crime is OK is not a great place to live.
If we provide avenues for people to provide for themselves, crime will drop, and we avoid all of the chilling side effects of total surveillance.
And I say over and over, it is time to evaluate the true cost of crime.
Society should accept a little crime to be free != evaluate the true cost of crime.
So if there's a neighborhood that has the potential to sell Condos for $1.7M each but currently has houses that are $50k and we find out that the crime in the area is keeping that value so low - should we go after the thieves for stealing $1.7M from homeowners?
I'm just saying because that's one of the ways you add up the "true cost of crime".
I would rather someone speed through my neighborhood than have 3 police cars make a spectacle and spend thousands of dollars.
Speeding is a problem fixed by a proper education (in theory) It is not fixed by chasing someone down and giving them a speeding ticket.
proposition 47 made anything below $950 keeps the crime a misdemeanor which likely means the thieves face no pursuit and no punishment. this led to a spike in car break ins as well. You can do this daily!
the simple matter he is that those voting on such changes to the law are not going to be troubled by the uptick as where they tread they are likely never to be victims of their policy
[1] https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/while-cities-homeless-...
>As crime dries up, Japan’s police hunt for things to do