Police, prosecutors used junk science to decide 911 callers were liars
propublica.org
propublica.org
It sounds like some judges throw this out of court, but people have been convicted based on this stuff.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23556915-911-cops-sc...
Investing in an acting coach to help you convince the jury that you are the victim might be a better strategy than teaching science to flat earther jurors.
There is little an acting coach can do to make you believable. It will likely make you less so. First, you won't be any good to start, and your instincts will get in your way. Second, the kind of things you do to act don't look good in real life. Even the most natural acting is actually highly stylized, and looks good only to a camera or an audience who has suspended disbelief.
You'd do better just winging it and hoping for the best. Your lawyer might give you instructions on how to manipulate a jury, but they will probably just tell you to be honest and let them do the work of putting it into context for a jury.
Acting is a specialized skill that is superficially easy and deeply hard. Crossing from one to the other is an aggravating process of suppressing all the things that make a good naive actor succeed and replacing them with things that feel completely wrong.
I suppose that’s Perry Mason stuff, but it makes logical sense.
If a cop has a criminal detector, they should be able to detect the criminal from a lineup.
I’ve personally heard police say the exact opposite: criminals can be the last person any would expect …
> showing the many times the cop had been in the room with criminals
> detect the criminal from a lineup.
Why would they want to try that, what do they care if you ask them to try
It's the well to do types who've only ever lived their life in nice places, never stepped out of line and never had much if any adversarial interaction with government systems that prosecutors want on the jury.
Allowing an expert witness to testify and refusing to allow a dissenting expert witness to testify is one of those situations.
You also have to be able to afford this procedure, or figure out some way to represent yourself. You might think you can afford it. While inmates are legally afforded access to law libraries, it's basically a joke from my understanding. Something like no more than 1 hour a week.
Indeed, it did not. It's so notorious it has it's own wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect
No, police do not generally just go grab somebody and prosecute them. But they do regularly go and look for people who might be tangentially connected, determine they are guilty, and make up a case to prove them so. I've seen it happen personally, a good friend of mine spent time in prison for a crime someone else committed, I testified on their behalf at the trial to no avail.
Police and prosecutors want to win. Police get promoted by "solving cases" which has no relation to whether or not the guilty person went to jail, only whether someone went to jail. Prosecutors make their political bones on the backs of people they put in prison -- again, whether they are guilty or innocent doesn't actually matter.
I'm well aware of how the justice system works, as I pointed out above.
My claim is not false, it is borne out by the facts of what actually happens. The comment above lays out the numbers. There is zero incentive in the law for a prosecutor or a police officer to punish the guilty person. There is great incentive to punish someone, anyone so that everyone's statistics look good for promotion.
The reason that not all cases are cleared is that not all prosecutors and police officers are crooks. One could even say that most of them aren't. That fact doesn't bear on my assertion.
And your accusation of me being a leftist is about the silliest assertion anyone has ever made.
It's something like 4-6%. For some crimes it may be as low as 1% and for others as high as 10%. There are many reasons why this happens and there's no one thing that's going to drastically lower the rate:
- Although it may seem unbelievable, a significant percentage of these convictions were the result of confessions
- A significant percentage of the wrongfully-convicted pleaded guilty
- Oftentimes the defendant is known to police who are reasonably certain they've committed other heinous crimes (this is the "he's guilty of something" argument)
Some information here: https://innocenceproject.org/research-resources/
> It fails basic logic because from this premise, the police abs prosecutors are ready, willing, and able to prosecute and largely convict innocent people and it is in their benefit to have high clearances. What explains the disparity?
It also looks bad if prosecutors are railroading very obviously innocent people. The only reason it's happening as much as it does is the poor saps who get caught up don't have a very clear alibi or other evidence showing their innocence
This is a non-sequiter, given that a prosecutor wanting to lock anyone up regardless of guilt doesn't imply that they'd be capable of achieving that.
It’s so bad the tinfoil hat me often thinks it’s an op by the military industrial complex to ensure one of their biggest cash cows never faces budget issues.
It's a motte and bailey. The sentiment behind "defund the police" goes well beyond the set of things most people agree with, but its proponents retreat "we actually agree on 95% of the issue" when challenged.
Yes, we do. But the remaining 5% is completely unacceptable.
The whole "defund the police doesn't actually mean defund the police" defence is silly , and it makes it appear more people are in favour of "defund the police" than they actually are.
“Defund the police” actually does mean “defund the police”, and this despite attempts to dress it up as the more reasonable position that is incidentally held by a significant portion of the American public.
Even if we want to play fast and loose with semantics and interpretation, that particular formulation is chosen because it reflects an extreme position. It is a phrase that conveys (in the most general and imprecise terms) the sentiment of “I support the radical solution”. By construction, it points to a set of beliefs held by radical minority.
The motte and bailey consists in both (1) focusing on the slight differences in opinion between radicals and (2) focusing on the reasonable beliefs that the average person might share with radicals, while ignoring the unreasonable ones that are not shared. Thankfully, most people see through this, if only on a gut level.
The confusion is not accidental; it is intentional.
You are, at best, repeating a dog-whistle of a slogan. At worse, you are playing semantic games. In all cases, I would encourage you — under the charitable assumption that you are not an extremist — to prefer a turn of phrase that more precisely conveys your actual beliefs, rather than one that aims to confuse the issue and radicalize thought. As a bonus, it’ll elevate the level of discourse and make for an interesting discussion.
Certainly not; there is an enormous difference between "I am saying one thing but my secret plan is another thing" and "using a bad slogan that's easily misinterpreted".
I don't like this whole "motte and bailey" kind of stuff in the first place; it's guessing at people's motivations and poison for reasonable constructive solutions or compromises. If everyone keeps guessing at people's motivation and what's in their heart of hearts we'll never get anywhere with anything.
> You are, at best, repeating a dog-whistle of a slogan
I'm not "repeating" it; I'm saying it's a bad slogan, but also adding some nuance because sure, here are some people who mean it literally, but for many others it's "just" a phrase. I wish people would stop using it, yes, but I'm also not going to dismiss the entire argument or movement just because they're using a bad slogan.
Calling it defund is an extra critique of funding police instead of social services
It is especially problematic because police orgs are generally pretty good at adopting new techniques. But unfortunately the marketplace of ideas they have to shop in suffers from overrepresentation of garbage products. A huge part of law enforcement enhancement is going to involve cleaning this market up.
I'm not sure what's the bigger problem. The use of junk science by law enforcement or how law enforcement and their methods are portrayed by popular media that ensure the use of junk science (and other harmful methods) can persist long-term. I'm sure everybody and their mother has seen Dexter (who works as a blood splatter analyst) or any number of shows/movies or all the news where police dogs are portrayed in an incredibly positive light (I'm looking at you, Paw Patrol).
And gut feelings, gut feelings of detectives were literally treated as evidence in those documentaries
I had a law enforcement in-law who was confident he could figure out a man by shaking his hand and looking at him in the eye, etc etc. He was perennial favourite of all the sleezy salespeople around because while he was certain he was getting a deal and being taken care of and getting the good stuff, for anything I had any insight into (computer, car, photo, and music stuff), he was getting ripped six ways to Sunday. But his confidence was not to be shaken.
Listen dude there I have enough beef with paw patrol to make a texas ranchers BBQ look ill equipped, from the fact the mayor is an idiot, that obnoxious chicken the fact the town has outsourced all of it's emergency functions to what is basically the mafia, the fact that they sit on a money printer of toys and the fact that the song haunts my house day in and day out.
But to say that Paw Patrol is a problem because it has a police dog in it and that he helps people is equivalent to saying that Daniel Tiger is anti-Democracy because it has a Royal Family.
It’s a superb video essay and absolutely worth the watch! But to be clear, it’s also playing into the meme that paw patrol is copaganda, so take it as a mix of comedy and serious analysis :)
The gist of the video is that, while paw patrol is not copaganda, it is problematic for parallel reasons. It’s also a terrible tv show as you noted.
Skip Intro has excellent videos all in all. "Copaganda" is his series diving into cop shows (and analyzing them in the context of what is and isn't copaganda). He doesn't claim that a particular show is copaganda just because he's analyzing it.
If you "wouldn't say [the video] is superb" because, instead of watching it, you've looked at the titles of his other videos, I dunno what to tell you.
And yes, my agenda of wanting more accountability for police who murder citizens and destroy their lives by abusing their power is "weird". What's wrong with you?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Harris Or maybe you just don't care that the Supreme Court decided that police dogs are fine and current training is sufficient to prove their reliability despite overwhelming evidence showing otherwise
> Harris was the first Supreme Court case to challenge the dog's reliability, backed by data that asserts that on average, up to 80% of a dog's alerts are wrong.
> In the first 9 months of 2011, dogs alerted (and police searched) 14,102 times, and drugs were found only 2,854 times—a false alert rate of 80%. Those results, they say, are surprisingly consistent – in 2010, the false alert rate was 74%.[3] Further still, the study found that individual dog's performance varied wildly, with accuracy rates ranging from a high of 56% to a low of 7%, with two-thirds of the dogs performing below the average.
> The United States Supreme Court returned a unanimous decision on February 19, 2013, ruling against Harris and overturning the ruling of the Florida Supreme Court.[29] In the unanimous opinion, Justice Elena Kagan stated that the dog's certification and continued training are adequate indication of his reliability, and thus is sufficient to presume the dog's alert provides probable cause to search, using the "totality-of-the-circumstances" test per Illinois v. Gates. She wrote that the Florida Supreme Court instead established "a strict evidentiary checklist", where "an alert cannot establish probable cause ... unless the State introduces comprehensive documentation of the dog's prior 'hits' and 'misses' in the field ... No matter how much other proof the State offers of the dog's reliability, the absent field performance records will preclude a finding of probable cause."[30]
Man, for real. Literally every other episode this lady loses her chicken and the paw patrol have to risk life and limb to get it back. Like, at some point, maybe you shouldn't have a pet chicken?
Daring Danny X and his antics have with Alex's accidents have got to be near a third of their call volume
Any positive portrayal of police in US media is problematic. Teaching children to trust the police is only going to get some of them jailed on fabricated evidence or killed, especially if they aren't white and affluent.
edit: Ok, apparently Paw Patrol is Canadian, so mea culpa. I guess the police are actually civil servants there. It's still a problem when shown to US children.
Actually, by your logic, you must think the vast majority of crimes or an enormously significant amount of crimes are committed by police because you claim trusting police will get you killed or jailed. However, it is certainly true that enormous numbers of people “trust”, in some sense, the police but the problem we do not see the numbers of those people being killed/jailed to support your position.
If junk science were rejected where it matters, the media wouldn’t use it either, or would at least treat it they way they do dowsing or psychics.
The media will serve any demand, no matter how dumb. But there has to be demand. That’s my theory anyway.
There's plenty of evidence police dogs are worse than a coin flip and react to their handlers - but the supreme court said that was irrelevant and upheld basing a search off a dog's reaction to be valid. Dogs also act as a proxy for brutal, violent treatment of someone.
And those analysts are part of a law enforcement community that is rife with biases about crime and guns, which means most of the places where the system finds gunshots are where the biased people (who by default placed the detectors according to a bias) expect to hear gunshots.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28264686 has previous discussion on this from a number of viewpoints.
If you designed a polar bear detector to help prevent people from being eaten by polar bears, would you also deploy them in Florida for the sake of fairness, even though there are no polar bear attacks there?
To be clear... the goal of the police _force_ is to enforce the law. The goal of (some) individual police officers is public safety, but certainly not all of them (and some days, it seems like not many of them... but you generally only hear about the bad stuff in the news, so take that with a grain of salt).
Often enforcing the law helps secure budgets (especially when it comes to enforcing drug laws with lucrative civil forfeiture seizures), but more recently many police departments have tried a different tactic when budgets have been threatened: actively refusing to enforce the law, in order to increase crime and prompt political change.
I conclude that it is a matter of public safety to avoid reinforcing biases.
Since the article this thread is about shows that some portion of police are willing to believe any damn thing, I think my concerns are reasonable.
Could it be "bias" to look at crime statistics? Maybe it's less safe than you think it is.
A low crime statistic can either mean crime didn't happen, or the statistic didn't count the crimes that did
Besides the original comment, you can also read the multiple comments elsewhere in this thread making similar points. I am not too hopeful it will help, since your reading comprehension is obviously lacking.
Clearly, the all-too-common combination of stupidity and arrogance is alive and present in you. It is embarrassing how someone who have lost the plot then turns around and says that it is the other party that has lost the argument. Too stupid to understand and arrogant enough to inflict your ignorance on others. Thankfully, many of the users here easily recognized your hubris. No, it is you who are done. How humiliating.
But you can't leave it alone now, can you? Maybe now you'll have to write fifty paragraphs. Stay up all night doing it, too.
So you're not even a real HN'er. Why don't you tell everyone who it is who's so free with the insults? Or are you scared to take responsibility for them?
Do you plan to also change fire regulations to call for an even distribution of sprinklers? Presumably you don't want to die from fire-bias either...
This is already reinforcing bias, because your question presumes that the places law enforcement deploys this tech are where it needs to be. To use your analogy, cops like deploying polar bear detectors based on how much snow falls in a place, because "everyone" knows that polar bears live in snowy places.
No, we don't. We know where law enforcement, which we already know is biased, reports shootings happening.Those are two completely different things.
For a really contrived example, in a police department of one for the whole world, put the only officer in Antarctica. You'll find there's only officially shootings in Antarctica
If you are claiming that there is significant bias here, you must present evidence that there are unreported shootings in an amount to make up a significant percent of all shootings in the US, or that there is an organized conspiracy by law enforcement to mislead the public about the location of shootings.
I mean, if I make a magic box that has a 1% chance per day of calling the police and telling them a crime happened nearby and then only stick that box in areas where poor people live, you could see how that would lead to a whole lot of calls for police in those areas. You can also see how, by having a vastly higher police presence in those areas, more crimes will be detected in those areas, even if the base crime rate is the same as in a different area.
In the past, ShotSpotter employees have gone into the system and changed things after the fact to claim that their system detected shots in a specific area that it never detected. They did this while working with the police to come up with probable cause for an arrest after the arrest happened.
This kind of thing makes it easy for the cops to arrest people they want to arrest without any actual evidence of a crime. This is generally considered a bad thing in the USA.
It could be possible that police and police chiefs are in fact, putting this equipment in poorer neighborhoods because that is where the most gunfire already is.
Concerns about the relationship between employees and prosecutors are real, but "reinforcing biases" is the least of our worries in regards to marginalized communities when they are murdered at 5 to 20x the rate of the nonmarginalized communities.
Black communities are majority-support of the same or more police per Gallup https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...
Removing police from poorer areas hurts poor people more than edge case concerns about individual prosecutors playing fast and loose.
ShotSpotter works in isolation because in isolation a certain noise profile is almost certainly a gun shot. Like most ML aiming to change the world it's powered by p-hacking.
Gunshot Detection and Location System
Combine gunshot detection with ALPR evidence to drive better outcomes
Court system have one basic goal, to be a test if accused party have enough money to spend on lawyers, experts and their expertise. Affluenza much?
A scientific tool could prove a different direction than what law enforcement wants it to say.
The problem imo is that cops have an insular culture and are trained to control situations. That control is often an Illusion. They are also often exempt from some of the procurement rules that apply to other government entities. So they tend to accept handshake claims from people identified as “good guys” through some connection or the salesman’s former on the job status.
Another issue is that they don’t pay for or maintain technology in many cases, and the organizations tend to want to fund overtime, gas and bullets over all else. Police rely on grants to buy stuff with tight timelines. So there’s a tendency to blow the federal grant quickly on something cool that some “good guy” promises.
It's not exactly the same, but there have been countless examples of prosecutors and police officers who, when faced with convictions overturned due to DNA evidence, continued to maintain that the person was nevertheless guilty despite that evidence. And if I'm being totally honest, I can't even imagine how tempting that fantasy would be.
The alternative is acknowledging that you got it wrong and an innocent person paid an extraordinary price for your failure, losing years of their life behind bars. Worse yet, your failure allowed allowed the actual murderer/rapist/etc. to get off scot-free and potentially harm others.
It's terrifying enough to imagine screwing up a single case. Now imagine screwing up hundreds or possibly thousands, after spending years using what you believed to be forensic science that turned out to be little more than bullshit. In that light, the temptation to search for alternative explanations, fight against information and evidence that contradicts your theory of the case, etc. has to be overwhelming. And while there are absolutely people in the justice system who don't succumb to that temptation, there are plenty who do.
For starters, they don't actually care. If it will provide an excuse which can arbitrarily and selectively be cited to justify action, they will embrace it and train their officers on it; if public belief in it is likely to lead to more deference to law enforcement and fear of crime, they will also blast it in their PR (see magic fentanyl). If it will provide an excuse for actions that woild otherwise seem to violate civil rights, they’ll also invest heavily in it.
Truth isn’t relevant to many od the things police agencies pay to train officers on; power is. And the people—often former law enforcement themselves—crafting and selling these ideas know the market they are targeting.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/daubert_standard
> Under the Daubert standard, the factors that may be considered in determining whether the methodology is valid are: (1) whether the theory or technique in question can be and has been tested; (2) whether it has been subjected to peer review and publication; (3) its known or potential error rate; (4)the existence and maintenance of standards controlling its operation; and (5) whether it has attracted widespread acceptance within a relevant scientific community.
https://michiganprosecutor.org/careers/current-positions/858...
https://www.bcgsearch.com/bestlawfirms/KrjDr/Miller-Canfield...
I'm a lawyer who paid off some debt at a large firm straight out of law school, before going into government service. More than a decade later, I still don't make as much as I did when I was 24. I find it exceedingly difficult to imagine anyone making the same move if they were so motivated by money that they'd be susceptible to kickbacks.
> They randomly assigned criminal cases to judges within the court (in other court systems, case assignment isn’t random). If the future crime rate ended up lower for people sentenced by lenient judges than by judges who sent more people to jail, it would be clear evidence that time in jail — not any quality within the criminals themselves — was making the difference.
No it does not evidence that conclusion. Judges have written sentancing guidelines. A repeat offender, vicious offender or someone who has burned up their three strikes is likely going to both get a serious prison sentance and reoffend.
You can't disentangle that reasoning on a post hoc statistical analysis. That is pseudoscience.
> the data suggest that people held in jail before trial have a higher likelihood of committing crime after their release than people who remain in the community before trial.
The article goes on to argue that this is because people no longer trust the system.
We use pretrial detention for criminals who are either more likely to flee or committed more serious offenses.
That conclusion from JSTOR has no evidence and flies in the face of any sane reasoning. They didn't even questionnaire the re-offenders!
This isn't the only piece of work on this subject nor the best nor even a representative one. If you're interested you could look into this entire domain of research and see what it suggests.
Maybe he just disagrees. If you didn't present "the best nor even a representative" link, why don't you contribute to the debate and present it?
Then why did you post it?
Did you read the actual studies to see if they controlled for this very obvious objection? Seems important when accusing of incompetence.
> We use pretrial detention for criminals who are either more likely to flee or committed more serious offenses
We also use it for people who can't afford to get out, who then often lose their jobs, possibly where they live, etc. I know this because the article states that directly, not your "article goes on to argue that this is because people no longer trust the system" summary which doesn't appear to be part of the article (but maybe I just missed it?).
> “Holding them for a couple days, a couple months pretrial has devastating implications[1] for their lives,” Ghandnoosh says. Many find it hard to keep a job, hard to keep their housing. Such outcomes for a minor offense or no offense at all, she says, makes it more difficult to live a law-abiding life and could tip people into crime.
Seems like lots of evidence in the article, actually, and overall the criminologists quoted seem very careful to not overstate the conclusions the evidence can support.
[1] https://www.cato.org/research-briefs-economic-policy/economi...
Does this mean you would be in favor of judicial reform that prevented those convicted of non-violent crimes from going to prison? No reason to keep someone locked up on a petty possession charge if our concern is safety of others.
Locking people up only prevents them committing crime while they're locked up. It doesn't do anything to solve the actual problem.
Does it fix the problem? Does it get the people they scammed their money back?
Furthermore, you are therefore implying that if we did not issue any prison sentences then we would have the same amount of crime as we do now (or possibly you think it would be less) because the threat of prison has no effect of deterrence. That is unbelievably ridiculous.
Let's put it this way - suppose someone is too illiterate to get a job (like a huge chunk of the prison population) and turns to theft to support themselves, possibly because they have a drug habit. Does locking them in prison make them any more less addicted to drugs, or any more able to get a job? Does it actually solve the underlying problem?
The only thing that is actually a deterrent is actually catching criminals [1]. No criminal does what they do expecting that they'll get caught and then weighing the crime against the potential sentence.
> Of course it does. To say it doesn’t is fallacious.
"trust me bro, its common sense"
[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-best-way-to-end-mass-incarc...
What studies show about this over and over is that being in certain situations increases the likelihood of a given person committing a certain crime. If you remove them from the situation, but now someone else is in that situation, the likelihood of the crime is being committed is unchanged.
Now people there is variance in how resistant people are to the influences of those situations, and it varies both by individual and by the specific crime. It's possible that eventually you will have imprisoned everyone who would ever commit a crime under any circumstances, or at least under the current ones. I don't find the costs of that acceptable, both financially and in terms of human suffering. But if you do you should argue for that, rather than lean on the implicit point that some people are inherently criminal by their natures and so should be isolated for it.
How is this not just another way of saying "some people are inherently criminal by their nature"?
I'd also add there is nuance here. Not everyone in a situation will behave the same way. What's changing is the tendency towards behavior due to environment.
So everybody in the US just has a random small chance of becoming a school shooter or serial killer?
I assume you support complete elimination of the criminal justice system and courts then, because in your worldview it seems criminals have no agency and the chance of them committing a crime is 100% a function of their environment.
I believe that if you CAN be rehabilitated into society, you SHOULD be, and any imprisonment should be used for that purpose and that purpose alone.
If you CANNOT be rehabilitated into society, you shouldn't be imprisoned with the other people who can be, but should be put off in a group of your other "irredeemable" peers or something.
I think anyone CAN be rehabilitated, by the way, but not everyone will want to.
I see how people get away with this as pundits or advocates because the money involved is indirect (they are lying for position or notoriety, not directly taking someone's money) but teaching a fake science "technique" for money? How is it different than selling snake oil?
His last words were telling the operator to tell his mom he loved her.
Makes you wonder if their system flagged his call and it wasn’t entirely the result of a completely incompetent 911 operator and cop.
Isn't that already the case?
In spirit, perhaps. In fact, no. If you opt for court-provided representation, your defense attorney will typically have less than an hour to prep for your case -- barely long enough to get "your side of the story" and certainly not long enough to discover nuances relevant to the law. And you might even still have to pay; in Texas, for example, you're not entitled to court-appointed representation if your income is above some unspecified amount.
https://apnews.com/article/court-decisions-eric-holder-supre... highlights the fact that this right extends only to criminal matters, many if not most defendants don't actually receive proper representation, and are subject to political motivations.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/national-survey-indigent... highlights some numbers around things like most systems for indigent defense still requiring payment, like application fees or recoupment, and the lack of lawyers in public defenders offices.
Remember also that this is only the system if the court decides you "can't pay" and that's not the same thing as "can't pay without selling your house" or "can't pay without cleaning out your $1000 savings account". Judges can decide that since you're living at home your parents can afford to sell their assets to finance your defense, etc. So it's quite porous and there are people who can't afford an effective defense as we would understand but don't meet a judge's interpretation of their state's standard for indigency.
In theory yes, according to the US Supreme court in Gideon vs Wainwright. [0] In practice no. Public defender programs are chronically underfunded in the United States. The problem seems to affect states regardless of the party in control. [1]
[0] https://www.oyez.org/cases/1962/155
[1] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...
He tells me that something like half of his tiny department quit after the pandemic. He has a crazy number of cases to handle, there is no way he can do his full job for any of them.
Imagine an engineer designing something safety-critical based on a single scientific paper describing a result that hadn't been replicated elsewhere. Engineers usually don't do that, but if they do they face significant liability and risk losing their licenses.
> Like all evidence, the proponent must establish authenticity and admissibility. The issue of authenticity has been addressed in federal court with the addition of Fed. R. Evid. 902(13) and (14). Louisiana has not yet adopted similar amendments to the Louisiana Rules of Evidence.
> This rule eliminates the necessity of a foundational witness at trial. The person who makes the certification must meet Rule 602 (personal knowledge) and Rule 702 (scientific or specialized knowledge) and Rule 901(b)(9) requiring explanation of how the process or system that generated the electronic record produces reliable and accurate results.
> With a human expert, if you want to challenge the opinion, you file a motion in limine which allows you to put on evidence prior to trial to contest the expert's qualifications to give the opinion or the expert's methodology. > The proponent of the AI opinion will have to establish that the Al algorithm produces accurate results. If the proponent cannot do that, then the evidence is unreliable. Unreliable evidence is not relevant.
[...]
> At the end of the day, if the court finds the Al opinion authentic, then it will be admitted in evidence and the opponent will not be able to cross examine the opinion at trial.
Gosh, the only thing I can think of that might save us is challenging the features that become inputs into the models - however, with GPT-4's example, as those increase to inhumane sizes, I wonder if even that will remain an effective strategy.
Source: Louisiana Bar Association Journal
Television does not help. Copaganda shows like Bones, NCIS, CSI, The Mentalist, Criminal Minds, and others give a very unrealistic portrayal of what technology and people are capable of. And it's become the standard that is expected. And gives the illusion that if there is a "process", it must be accurate. That if the answer is precise, it is accurate.
> Prosecutors charged the mother with second-degree murder, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. She took a plea deal — without admitting guilt — that resulted in a manslaughter conviction and she served about two years. “We would never have known the truth,” Garland wrote to Harpster, “if it hadn’t been for your book and your excellent training.”
The possibilities here are:
1. This women was innocent, her child died, and she spent 2 years in prison, or 2. This woman was guilty of murder and only spent 2 years in prison.
Either way, surely this concept of a "plea deal" is a broken one that doesn't lead in any way to justice?
(I’d argue we shouldn’t, after all, anyone, including judges, can hire out for legal advice as required)
Many of them DID pass peer review. They had papers written on how well they work.
Obviously something in that peer review process has (yet again) led us to junk science.
What it's not is replication or in any way an indication that the original research was independent. The person reviewing your report has no way to know if your data is totally fabricated or not unless they try to replicate your study.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27959755
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258854
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31958201
I believe I have read similar about drug sniffing dogs and certain forms of field drug testing.
There appears to be no sufficient mechanism for preventing junk science from tainting the process of justice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruentation
Fortunately it appears ai will soon enough act as a modern version of God's judgment, which while still not perfect, should be significantly better than some random cop's gut feeling.
"The AI finds it likely that you committed the murder."
It doesn't have to be this way, but given the perpetual misunderstanding and misapplication of AI, I think it's likely to happen anyway.
Then the AI wouldn't be saying, "I think it's likely you did this", it would be saying, "Here's the video of you doing this".
I don't see any reason that is a necessary precondition for an evolving reliance on AI judgement. Though obviously there are potential interactions between surveillance ubiquity and that.
> Then the AI wouldn't be saying, "I think it's likely you did this", it would be saying, "Here's the video of you doing this".
Crimes tend to have elements that cannot be shown on a video, but which might be deemed likely based on a video, like knowledge and intent.
So, it will exactly be “I think oy is likely that you did this”.
Any black box thing, (that is, any system where raw data comes in and a result comes out without everyone involved fully understanding the process) should not have the authority to take a human's freedom from them of its own volition.
I would much rather utilize them as a Sherlock whose job is to assemble the evidence that is available and state their conclusions to the jury, who could then make their decision based off of the evidence.
The ai creates a video animating the way it thinks you did it, which adds a couple extra legs and an extra eye, but the jury is already biased to think the defendant is likely to have extra eyes and legs, so they accept the ais description
> Then the AI wouldn't be saying, "I think it's likely you did this", it would be saying, "Here's the video of you doing this".
Reality of what this video shows will be is much closer to: " we have some video(we are not sure if AI properly reconstructed low quality recording and then matched person accused of crime, example: changing letters in photocopies), does video shows real crime or it only looks like a crime from certain angle, it search data for crimes not for proofs of innocence. After all what stops people behind AI from over representing as criminals people with evil mustaches (consciously or not, doesn't matter), so at start it assigns them a higher score?