Hacker News Reader

Comment by rvnx | Hacker News Reader

Not a problem, if person contests, double-check the picture. Like with a speed camera.

For most of the cases, won’t need a human in the loop.

One might argue that a citizen shouldn't need to prove they didn't break a law, but rather the government has to (reliably) prove that they did.

I wonder if there's a phrase for that.

That’s what the picture is for

False positives can be human validated

false positives can also be human generated

I've contested the red light camera fines in my municipality a few times now. In every case I request the footage and each time it's been overturned because the footage clearly shows me stopping before turning right on read. Ive never had to provide proof that is the states job.

Meanwhile, I've never had to contest a false positive because my state doesn't allow red light cameras. That's a lot of time that I haven't had to spend defending myself against spurious charges.

It doesn't especially matter where the burden of proof lies if the process for contesting requires any substantial amount of effort on the part of the victim of the false positive.

You did have to provide proof! you were assumed guilty until you proved yourself innocent by using the evidence that the state themselves already had, but didn’t present as proof of the infringement.

In this case the assumption is that the camera evidence is accurate and conclusive. If it was a blurry picture, I don’t think they would be asked to provide additional evidence to prove they weren’t guilty, the ticket would simply be thrown out.

In other words, the burden of proof is still on the government to provide sufficient evidence. If they won’t or can’t, there is no case.

The person I replied to was required to challenge the assumption that they were guilty, and the camera evidence exonerated them every time, so by your standards should have been thrown out. The “burden” was on them to “prove” themselves innocent, its literally in the name. Just because the state possessed the evidence to prove his case doesn’t mean the burden was on them

Exactly. Forcing someone to challenge a fine that they've already been issued is not presumed innocence, it's presumed guilt. If someone fails to act affirmatively to challenge the fine for any reason (work commitments, disability, death in the family, the list goes on) then they're on the hook for the charge in spite of the fact that the state knowingly used an inaccurate system to issue the fine.

The state should have reviewed the footage and not charged you in the first place.

That should be codified into law because the state is doubly incentivized to do nothing about false positives. If you pay it, they get free money. If you don’t, they get free labor.

In this case, the article clearly states that a human will review the footage... not sure what happened in the above cases, if there was no review, or if the review was simply rushed? I do think it would be fair if the state had to pay the same fine back to the person they incorrectly fined as compensation for their time.

These tickets get sent in the mail with proof, the photos.

The only thing you can argue is that it shouldnt require a court case to dispute unless it fails a human review.

lol. No they don't.

It depends on the location, my local automated speed camera process involves getting a human-approved ticket in the mail that includes the photos.

You might be looking for one of those?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_onus

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(law)

I was being sarcastic, apologies :) The phrase I was referring to is "innocent until proven guilty."

None of our processes have a 0% false positive rate. Not tickets written by humans, not criminal charges filed by humans, not court cases tried in front of a jury. So maybe a phrase would be "unrealistic expectations".

But what we should expect (and demand) is that the process have no higher an error rate than human reporting, and that the errors should be no harder to correct/appeal.

> the process have no higher an error rate than human reporting, and that the errors should be no harder to correct/appeal.

I would actually ask that the errors be easier to correct, not just no harder.

Even if the error rate is lower, automated systems will detect a larger number of errors and therefore are likely to create a larger number of false positives. If we're going to automate the creation of false positives we need to equivalently automate their correction.

Even if we accept automated evidence gathering we don’t have to accept automating charges based on that evidence.

I can get behind this idea if and only if the government makes it absolutely trivial to request a human to review the ticket, with no additional fee and no attempt to dissuade people from exercising that right.

There should be a phone number, a QR code, and a printed link on the ticket that all provide a one-step process to contest a ticket. As soon as a ticket is contested it should be put on hold with no payment due until a follow-up ticket is issued by a human.

If we don't do this then we've just automated the creation of false positives without giving the victims of those false positives any equivalent advantage.

Better yet, the website could allow you to login an instantly view the evidence against you, in addition to filing the appeal. Also, if your appeal is found valid based on the video evidence, you should get the amount of the fine back from the government as a fee for them wasting your time.

They will do this. Later when some place like Booz Allen Hamilton picks it up, they will observe that revenue goes up when dark patterns and obfuscation goes up. So the initial implementation will go away.

Los Angeles doesn’t have a meaningful process to contest parking tickets: it’s an automatic denial, regardless of merit. The only way to get actual review is to go to civil court.

Sounds like the civil court is the meaningful contest?

My point is that no one should expect responsible or ethical behavior from LA in this area.

Do you have any statistics on that or is it personal experience?

You know, that's a good question. I was basing that on personal (and social circle) experience. But from a Google search, it looks like 34% of contests are successful: https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/is-las-system-to-fi...

That sounds a lot better than I typically hear but one thing I do keep in mind is that some people, especially men, take comments about their driving very personally and react only slightly less strongly than if someone said they were bad in bed. I’ve known a few guys who would rant about tickets as a tax without noticing that nobody who’d seen them driving believed it.

This doesn't work if the failures are correlated and very often happen to a certain group of people.

Imagine if the system was flawed and assigned all tickets with an unrecognized license plate to NULL or 000000. THe owner of that specific plate would have to spend their entire life contesting tickets.

A less extreme case of this would be a badly-trained model that always detects certain kinds of cars as occupying bus lanes, even if they're parked legally. If you're in the tiny minority that has one of those, you can't park anywhere without getting a ticket which you must contest.

If those cars end up statistically more likely to be owned by the poor / black / homeless, now the local government has a scandal on their hands.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com