An Indiana police department has been using Clearview AI for a year | Hacker News Reader

An Indiana police department has been using Clearview AI for a year

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All these tools and murder clearance rates are still historical low.

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...

NPR a few years ago: "Defund the police, all cops are bastards, snitches get stitches!"

NPR Today: "Why are murders going unsolved?"

The answer, clearly, is because of NPR.

Two questions:

1. Can you point me to where NPR said “snitches get stitches”

2. Which police departments precisely were defunded?

I watched this narrative unfold in the wake of George Floyd in my beloved Minneapolis. While I can't answer the question directly, I can relay the message that some law enforcement relatives told me:

While defunding never materialized, mass quitting and a huge change in enforcement away from areas that, well, might result in another George Floyd incident have produced effectively the same thing as a big old defund. There is less presence and less inclination to pursue calls in areas of trouble.

My opinion is this is kind of a temper tantrum on the part of some of these folks I spoke to, but the reality is that many of them fear getting caught up in sweeping reforms and made an example of.

Make no mistake those reforms are probably coming, esp after the federal report on the Minneapolis policing, but I don't think it will involve less money.

Makes sense. The thing to remember about members of law enforcement is that they never lie about things to improve their public standing, so it's logical to take that message from these relatives you mention at face value.

> As discussed throughout, the above results provide no evidence that greater police budgets lead to increases in homicide clearance rates (or equivalently, lower police budgets decrease homicide clearance rates).

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jels.12325

Let's set it to zero then, save billions.

Do you operate using anything besides fallacies?

> no evidence that greater police budgets lead to increases in homicide clearance rates (or equivalently, lower police budgets decrease homicide clearance rates).

No evidence. The experts are clear, police funding doesn't have anything to do with murder clearance rates. I mean that's super counter intuitive, I'd think the more interviews you do, the more forensics you have done, the more likely you are to solve the case but apparently not. I guess all that stuff was just a waste of time, or the experts are wrong once again.

Yeah, if we defund the police and I get burgled who am I supposed to call when I want someone to show up eight hours later, shoot my dog, and tell me there’s nothing they can do to help?

(Apologies for not just linking to the evergreen tweet, couldn’t find it)

Let me guess, they live in a major city led mostly by people who love NPR?

I'd love to see you try and use valid rhetoric to make a point.

I'll let one of you go first.

You have used logical fallacies such as an 'all or nothing' (if adding more money doesn't make it better, then removing all the money can't make it worse -- as if there is there is nothing in the middle) which sound persuasive but crumble when pointed out.

What you used just previous to my above post, about cities with people run by people who like NPR, is "cum hoc ergo propter hoc" which basically means 'because something exists with something else they must cause each other'. In other words 'because a city is run by a political party, that is the reason that cities have the problem X'. There may be a causation, but you haven't produced any persuasive elements to have anyone make that conclusion. Insinuation is not an argument.

When using fallacies as your rhetorical devices people will call you on it, and the response is not 'no you first', because you are being tasked with actually making the point you were trying to make but without using invalid strategies.

Unless of course you are not able to, in which case 'no you first' is simply a concession.

Can you actually make an argument? Being dismissive and insinuating things might be substantive to you, but I prefer if you actually say what you mean and back it with evidence.

I don’t believe there’s any proof of any police departments in the US being defunded.

It’s likely that one or two had their budgets drop by a marginal percent for a single year only and then got a substantial increase in budget the next year.

The murder clearance rate has been in the toilet for decades, maybe forever, everywhere in the US.

It’s also likely that you knew this already!

This country was founded on checks and balances. Without adversarial checks on the police, our country is literally done for.

This country was founded without police.

https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/

That's not exactly what the article says. It just says that the police forces were largely privatized and part-time. Naturally that changed as the country grew.

This feeds a strange notion that society was just fine without police. It wasn't.

> It just says that the police forces were largely privatized and part-time.

That's just disingenuous. These "police forces" were nothing like anything we have today, either in degree or kind. I don't know the name of this particular fallacy, but it's when you imagine something from modern life must have existed previous to this era, if but more primitive. There just wasn't any equivalent.

If we could time travel and go experience the late 1700s, we wouldn't say "oh, so those sheriffs and those US marshals were the police, I didn't recognize the uniform!". We'd be amazed and disturbed by how different life was in that regard.

I'm sorry my man, but from the outside? That's just a thing that is said and never acted upon.

That's kind of my point.

Shadow IT basically

Heh. I was thinking the same dang thing.

Does anyone have information on if it actually is working? Privacy and civil rights violations aside for a moment, how did it do?

This is what you can do with it https://www.police1.com/investigations/articles/judge-blocks...

So i'm in favor of police going back to the basics, good old-fashioned detective work. The forensics are not what they're cracked up to be, there's very little verifiability n verification, too easy for the forensics lab to lie through their teeth or contaminate the scene of the crime. Like when the Duke Lacross players had to hire a very expensive lawyer to do the messy work of proving evidence actually traced back to three other men that same day, that was noted as very difficult forensic work because OF COURSE the DA didn't want verification. Local DA Dan Nifong wanted to tamper w it, anything to pull off the lynching, mostly out of sadism n participating in the culture. Three equals three, easy to see it was three men's evidence left behind in Candice Mangum's evidence place, figured it would be a slam dunk requiring only a little bit of finesse. This lawyer got commended in front of all America by the legal profession, n proved Candice Mangum was pretty much correct it would be a slam dunk. It was only when these young men scraped together huge money for the hardcore IDEALISTIC civil rights lawyer (unicorn basically) to counter the momentum of the shakedown w perfect lawyering against Nifong's zero shame of screwing up on purpose w all the evidence--an uphill battle all the way...in 2006 iirc, like now in 2023 again.

You would be more persuasive if you didn't obviously have some kind of fixation with one court case.

Also formatting, references and not reducing are to r.

I'm sorry man, it's so difficult to parse all that you said and I really want to. Not enough to research on a Friday evening after a hell week though - and that part is on me.

It's not enough for the police to discover (to their own satisfaction) who committed a crime. The point is to prosecute the offender or otherwise resolve it in a way that protects the public.

"Old-fashioned detective work" doesn't help with that at all. What does it turn up? Eyewitnesses? About the worst evidence possible, on par with dreams and reading tea leaves. Sometimes it bullies someone into perjury. That's not even evidence at all.

Forensics are about the only thing that counts as real evidence outside of capturing crimes on video. And if they seem to cause bad results, it's probably because we're not doing it enough. Hell, we have the technology to prove to anyone's satisfaction that chain of custody hasn't been broken... no one's bothered to build the product.

Absolutely, a significant portion of "old timey police work" was to blame it on the least liked guy you could find. A large percentage of people ON DEATH ROW are later proved innocent by actual evidence, including people who were convicted by those "old timey" methods.

>Forensics are about the only thing that counts as real evidence outside of capturing crimes on video

One huge problem is what courts accept as "forensics" is closer to CSI bullshit than actual science. Most forensic methods have no basis in science, come from a single ex cop who goes around the country speaking to other cops for a hundred grand a pop, and a network of "experts" who are willing to tell a jury that it is "scientifically sound" for a few thousand dollars. Things like handwriting analysis, micro-expressions, all the nancy drew types who pour over a ten second 911 call to overanalyze every tick and stammer in the stressed callers voice to paint them as the perp (THIS IS A REAL THING THAT HAPPENS)

If it wasn't outright illegal, American police would 100% be using lie detectors as evidence

> One huge problem is what courts accept as "forensics" is closer to CSI bullshit than actual science. Most forensic methods have no basis in science, come from a single ex cop who goes around the country speaking to other cops for a hundred grand a pop,

While there's some of that, let me tell you about my brush with this. I was called for grand jury duty. A day a week for a full month. Most was bullshit drug charges, child abuse/molestation, a few weird ones. Only one actual murder. Until that point, they never even bothered to have witnesses testify for any of it... it was like Junior Assistant DA show-and-tell time, but without the "show" part. That's another story though.

The murder was decades past, and they'd always had a suspect. He did seem like a real piece of work. But one of the evidence exhibits was the car he drove back during the murder. At the time, they found tire tracks where the victim's body was dumped. Identified some named model of tire, Firestone I think. I asked a question, which the detective misunderstood at first... he thought I was asking "did anyone sell that tire in this city back in the late 1980s" to which he answered "it was so common, many shops would've sold it". So I had to ask again. I asked:

"Was this particular tire model ever manufactured in a size where it would even have fit on that car?"

He uhhed-and-ahhed for a moment, before saying "that's a really good question".

Like, what the fuck am I supposed to do with that? Do I generalize, and think that if they fucked up on this one, all the rest of their evidence is complete horseshit too? If I penalize their bumbling by no-billing, am I letting a murderer go? It's not like they'll find the smoking gun next year, you know... this was like 30 years ago already. And, if I do vote to indict, the man's got no shot at a real trial. 99% of them plead down. Even for murder charges, maybe especially with those since they can dangle the death penalty as a means of compelling cooperation.

That was my one brush with the competence and skills of detectives. Despite this, all I can think is that no matter how bad their forensic evidence is, anything else is just so much fucking worse.

Off-topic trivia: While we were waiting on something one morning, one of the asst DAs was bragging about how in our city there are about 4000 cases each year, of which only maybe 30 would go to trial pre-covid. Assuming things have normalized so that they're giving trials to almost 1% of defendants again.

Let's look at your profile, it says,

[insert interesting falsehoods here]

which is a confession. You insert interesting falsehoods here, on Hacker News.

You yourself confessed, in your own words, you're full of shit.

Yeah because 1% going to trial sounded a little too high, most liars go for 2%, more believable. Stanford tried 2% of the accused, 1% is pushing it. 2% annual inflation. 2% of rape accusations are false. Say 1% or 0.75% and people call bullshit.

N again, you confessed that you "[insert interesting falsehoods here]" [sic brackets]. You wrote that w brackets in the original, i don't escape brackets as this isn't coding, normally brackets when i quote are when not absolutely sure word-for-word quote, to protect the integrity of my testimony for my eventual trial. Which is getn closer n closer, any day now, the longer you wait the less time left until your day in court, n it's been more than 14 years waiting for Stanford to try me.

The courts routinely allow the chain of custody to be a mess and when you challenge they respond with 'good faith'. Go search Lexus/Nexus for 'good faith' and find that 'chain of custody' really isn't a requirement because really who needs anything more than 'good faith'?

Lots of 'forensic science' has been found to either be garbage or complete subjective and results dependant on the person doing the 'science'. Some of that is still allowed in court because our court is based on precedent and if it was allowed before you as the accused have to fight precedent and prove why it should not longer be allowed (even though everyone accepts it has been disproven outside of court). Lie detector tests while not allowed to be a lone factor for conviction are still routinely used and required by the courts, especially as conditions of supervised release(parole/probation) and are administered at the supervised persons expense (court mandated and $280 a pop for pseudoscience that can get you hemmed up).

Other things that are easy to forget about Duke Lacrosse:

1) The "Gang of 88" never apologized.

2) The failure to prosecute Mangum and put her away led to a man's death; she's in jail for that now.

I have come to believe that the "Sherlock Holmes" tales were a massive copaganda campaign designed to prime the general public for advanced forensic investigation techniques.

I mean, Sherlock could "deduce" anything with his magnifying glass just by looking at a clump of mud on a shoe, or a thread of fabric on a lady's dress. But meanwhile, the actual police were developing actual scientifically-based theories of evidentiary examination that would revolutionize the jobs of detectives everywhere.

Sherlock Holmes's powers of deduction were, of course, exaggerated and improbable. Nevertheless, the author was probably privy to scientific developments that held promise. Fingermarks, for example, were emerging in law enforcement contemporary with Conan Doyle's writings.

If you want an amusing modern take on this, and you love to watch copaganda shows, I recommend the Canadian Murdoch Mysteries. They combine emerging science of the late 19th century with some really outlandish steampunk stuff ("The Tesla Effect") and it's a rollicking homage to Sherlock Holmes.

Anyway, fast-forward to the present day. I feel like police are way too reliant on technology instead of doing their job. I feel like the general public watches way too much CSI and NCIS and they expect to see an Abby Sciuto in every precint. I believe that if LEOs weren't shelving all those rape kits for 20 years, and spending $millions on bogus "gunshot detection" networks, and not purchasing literal urban assault vehicles and a stockpile of ammunition to rival Ruby Ridge, I think that they might focus their efforts on something more productive. Anything more productive.

> I mean, Sherlock could "deduce" anything with his magnifying glass just by looking at a clump of mud on a shoe, or a thread of fabric on a lady's dress. But meanwhile, the actual police were developing actual scientifically-based theories of evidentiary examination that would revolutionize the jobs of detectives everywhere.

This is a pop culture bastardization/modern reimagining of the original stories. Sherlock Holmes spent an absurd amount of his time memorizing things he could apply to his work, for example where certain trees grew and what their seeds look like, which he'd recognize in the clump of mud. Basic forensic techniques combined with things he memorized that the rest of us would have to look up.

It's kind of funny to watch Masnick wiggle around on this one. He wants to love web scraping. He's spent his entire career defending it to please the big tech firms that support him. But now he wants to play angry anti-police activist on this one particular use of the approach.

I'm sure he's perfectly happy with Google continuing to maintain their image database scraped from the web. So I really can't see why he's bothering to weigh in on this one.

The focus on police & government use of this sort of technology strikes me as misguided when there are an increasing number of publicly available tools that do the same thing.

I’m sure that Clearview has depth that other tools don’t, but Pimeyes does a pretty damned good job of identifying almost any face you feed into it - it’s also free and publicly available!

I’m all for restricting the use of this sort of technology by police departments and government, but this becomes a moot point if we only focus on government sanctioned software purchases. If I were a detective I’d just be feeding a suspects’ picture into Pimeyes on my personal device. I’m also equally if not more afraid of a future where these tools are available to private companies and the general public.

Nothing in recent years about the culpability of local US police departments in constitutional violations, crimes, corruption, and their lack of accountability and tendency to hire bullies who have been 'fired' from other departments for blatantly illegal actions has led you to question giving them access to more surveillance tools with no oversight?

> a moot point if we only focus on government sanctioned software purchases.

As far as I know, the public doesn't legally have the ability to bust your door down, shoot your dog, and put you in a room you can't leave until you pay them a bunch of money so you can wait for someone to tell you didn't do anything wrong.

I don’t disagree with anything you said - I just think it’s a case of missing the forest for the trees if we single out government purchases when many of these tools are well on their way to broad availability anyway. It feels like suspicion of and focus on government is occluding the larger problem here. The public may not have the legal authority to break down doors and generally take matters into their own hands, but that certainly doesn’t stop people from doing so.

Access to the tools by the public seems like a thorny legislative issue. There are no new laws that need to be passed to require cops to tell everyone how they found evidence.

That they call these 'investigative tools' and don't disclose their use is something very fixable.

Law enforcement can't think they don't have to be transparent from those who hold them accountable (including defense lawyers -- remember that 'free on a technicality' means that someone in the justice system did something very wrong and got called on it).

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