Portland passes broadest facial recognition ban in the US
cnn.com
cnn.com
The idea that anyone should be allowed to track the movement of everyone in a city is incredibly dystopian. No one needs the power to automate tracking people, and the potential for abuse is overwhelmingly high.
The Sheriff holds more power than most people realize. You can change the laws, but if you don't change the sheriff, then you get the same old police tactics.
Let's put it this way: if the Sheriff breaks the law, who will arrest them?
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This is in contrast to a Commissioner, like in NYC. If the commissioner breaks the law, the Mayor can fire them. Then the next commissioner can arrest them.
State or federal law enforcement officers, or, even city police. Depending on the specific structure of the department, possibly his own deputies.
Sheriffs are not, in theory or practice, immune to arrest, e.g.: https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/embattled-...
* Portland city passes a law, where its now illegal for police to use tear gas (https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racia...)
* The use of tear gas remains legal in the State, and Federal governments. (This appears to be a local law and/or ordinance).
* Local Sheriff decides the law is stupid, uses tear gas anyway.
The Sheriff hasn't broken any state, or federal law. Only the local law. Literally no one can arrest him in this situation.
Really depends on the locality.
In Massachusetts, counties (and sheriffs are a county position) are mostly vestigial judicial and law enforcement districts and the state even eliminated about half of its counties in the late 1990s.
On the other hand, when I lived in Louisiana, parish government (their equivalent of counties) was powerful so a sheriff was an important position.
Assuming the law is criminal, and applicable, city police probably can arrest him.
It seems quite probable, though, that the city does not have the authority to regulate county or state law enforcement tactics, so the law is simply invalid as applicable to him, which isn't a “we have a sheriff as opposed to some other structure of county law enforcement” problem, but “we are trying to regulate the actions of higher levels of government” problem.
EDIT: Actually, looking at your story, it doesn't look like there is any law at all—the Mayor of Portland made a policy change directed at his subordinates, which include the city police but not the Multnomah County Sheriff's Dpeartment. So no one can arrest anyone because there is no criminal law, except insofar a side of force inconsistent with city executive policy is covered by some criminal law applicable to Portland Police.
Good eye. I didn't notice that. In any case, the use of tear gas at demonstrations seems solidly like a "police tactic" to me.
If your area has elected police leaders, then its important to choose a sheriff that you believe in.
> so the law is simply invalid as applicable to him, which isn't a “we have a sheriff as opposed to some other structure of county law enforcement” problem, but “we are trying to regulate the actions of higher levels of government” problem.
As far as I'm concerned, this is a "most people don't seem to understand how their own government works". The Sheriff's check on power is the election. The locality elects the Sheriff, which is why its usually so difficult to remove the Sheriff (because the Sheriff represents the will of the people).
Sheriffs are relatively hard to remove by the very design of the office. It makes their elections very important.
In case of Seattle’s attempt at banning use of tear gas, the federal judge also didn’t say “the police might get significantly more violent”. Do you have a source on that, because it feels like editorializing. From https://crosscut.com/2020/07/judge-blocks-seattles-ban-tear-...
> The DOJ argued that implementing a ban on tear gas and other crowd control weapons, which the Seattle City Council passed in June, would result in “irreparable harm resulting from officer confusion and the inability to modulate force or de-escalate situations in which force may be needed.”
> "The issuance of this immediate change, without time for additional direction or training, is likely to result in officer confusion," he wrote.
Tear gas is, categorically, a chemical weapon. Just as rubber bullets are projectile weapons. You can call it a "less lethal chemical weapon" if you like, but it's no less a chemical weapon.
Meanwhile levying big fines against any local stores who use the technology for their own security.
In the far long term maybe people will be able to generate or design a brand new face for themselves on demand. Facial recognition is only so scary when the thing it recognizes is effectively a permanent identification card that must be worn at all times (pandemic times notwithstanding lol)
That is what local police in Washington State do to get around the state's long standing restrictions on wire-tapping.
And for example, does this prevent a hotel from implementing facial recognition so that they could greet a guest by name when they walk up to your check-in counter?
Regardless of the merits of such a ban or the lack thereof, why do it right now?
Maybe I've missed some subtleties in Portland politics, but the impression I've gotten is that the people there and the politicians that win elections there would greatly prefer that Biden beat Trump in the US presidential election that is 23 days from now.
One of the points Trump has been trying to run on is that he supports law and order and the Democrats support crippling law enforcement to aid anarchists and far left extremists who want to destroy everything good about America.
I will not be at all surprised if this ban becomes part of Trump's message at rallies and in ads and helps drive some votes to him.
There is no good way for Biden to counter that. If he comes out in agreement with the ban, it helps Trump's law and order message. If he comes out against the ban to appeal to the law and order voter, without a long explanation of subtle tradeoffs involved, he'll alienate some voters on the left. If he comes out against the ban with a long and subtle explanation, he'll still alienate those voters because who the heck is going to actually read the long and subtle explanation?
We are at the "sound bites are all that matters" stage of the election, and Portland is giving Trump a great sound bite. The damage minimizing option for Biden is to just ignore it, ceding those law and order voters to Trump.
What about facial recognition in Portland is so urgent that they could not wait a month on this?
These laws probably spawn out of that. It’s dealing with the manifestations they’re seeing in the protests at that local level.
I don’t live in Portland and I don’t read the articles closely. This is an uneducated guess.
You bring up a good point about dealing with local issues. This movement is centered around a municipal budget concern, which is diverting funds from the police department to other forms of emergency response and community support programs. That our city is now the poster-child of the Trump campaign is telling.
And honestly, what Portland or democrats actually so has so little impact on what trump says, that they might as well do what they want.
That need does not abate merely because the president is a fascist. He already marks himself clearly by positioning himself as diametrically opposite antifascism. No amount of propaganda can disguise that fact. And further, we know from history that appeasement does not work on fascists; we cannot merely sit back and let him have his way now while we plan for a future where he has mysteriously vanished.
The mere existence of Portland is offensive to their political ends; it frustrates them that people might want a better society, and vote thusly. Good! Let them be frustrated; we have no obligation to be nice or pleasant to fascists. I will enjoy seeing them cry when we elect a female antifa mayor soon.
Another thing, if we ban government and the police using it, why not ban it for everybody? Why Google can use it but not the government? At least with the government I can vote them out if they miss use it but what power do we have ver those huge corporates?
It seems to me like it it a power grab by those corporates, they want to have this power but not the government which might prevent them from taking over the world while preaching to us how good they are and on "the right side of history".
In the last year, Portland has shown a commitment to the American ideals of justice, equality, and freedom that place it among cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Birmingham.
Portland does the US proud.
Whether you agree or disagree with this ban seems to fall on two divisive opinion sets:
1) Facial recognition does more (less) good than harm
2) The police should (shouldn't) be given tools to do their job better
I'm very firmly in the "agree with both" camp, and it might make people that disagree on one or both opinions happy to hear that I'm starting to think the world is not heading in (what I view as) a good direction.
If people don't trust the police (or think that their job/role is a negative one), then they probably tend to focus more on the potential downsides or bad possibilities that could come with new or improved tools (of which there are many with facial recognition). If you don't like what the police are already doing, it's easy to assume giving them the tools to do it better would be a Very Bad Bad thing.
You definitely don't have to accept heavy-handed police-driven violence (which I don't) to understand that it's important for the police to be able to do their job better. Ironically, I think that physically unobtrusive information-based solutions (like FR) that let officers do their job with more information and less unpredictability would result in _less_ physical violence.
Those concerned about false positives should keep in mind that there is always a human in the loop to confirm matches - which makes the overall system ultimately no less accurate than a human’s ability to spot a suspect randomly. It doesn’t make sense to arbitrarily limit the use of technology here any less than it would to ban a police department’s access to electricity or other utilities. You either believe in having a police department (in which case you want it to be effective and efficient) or you don’t believe that and are okay with police being abolished. The gray space in the middle doesn’t make logical sense to me.
So the surveillance video isn't going to matter for protests anyway.
So I hope you can understand how little trust I hold in the police to make sure the suspect they caught on camera actually committed a crime. Consider a gray space in the middle where the system of policing we have needs reform before we can trust police with tools that make them more effective at acting against the communities they serve. Police should have been protecting protestors and their rights, but they have been antagonistic and violent from the start.