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Comment by Bostonian | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad that the man 'charging toward someone with a knife' was apprehended with facial recognition technology. In general I favor its use for catching violent criminals.

'Austin police officers have received the results of at least 13 face searches from a neighboring police department since the city’s 2020 ban — and have appeared to get hits on some of them, according to documents obtained by The Post through public records requests and sources who shared them on the condition of anonymity. “That’s him! Thank you very much,” one Austin police officer wrote in response to an array of photos sent to him by an officer in Leander, Tex., who ran a facial recognition search, documents show. The man displayed in the pictures, John Curry Jr., was later charged with aggravated assault for allegedly charging toward someone with a knife, and is currently in jail awaiting trial. Curry’s attorney declined to comment.'

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Now go type "facial recognition arrest false positive" into your favorite search engine.

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/police-say-a-si...

> And in New Jersey, police wrongfully arrested Nijeer Parks in 2019 after face recognition technology incorrectly flagged him as a likely match to a shoplifting suspect. An officer who had seen the suspect (before he fled) viewed the face recognition result, and said he thought it matched his memory of the suspect’s face.

I bet this officer also sent the same email: "That’s him! Thank you very much," before arresting an innocent man.

False positives are the main problem here, exactly. We'd all feel a lot better about facial recognition technology with police reform that ended/compensated the widespread harm being done to mere suspects, as well as fixing courtroom standards of evidence to take into account that things like facial recognition are essentially pulling signal out of noise. If facial recognition turns police onto a suspect who is then found to possess the stolen items, the latter is corroborating evidence that they've found the right person. If facial recognition turns police onto a suspect who then merely looks like what eyewitnesses remember, that part of the witness's recollection is inherently correlated to how the suspect was picked and so it needs to be disregarded.

seems likely that face recognition technology and cameras could reduce the frequency of police-civ interactions

You will get false positives with eyewitness identification as well. But if you only use one identification method you'd never know if another would disagree.

> But if you only use one identification method

I'd like to emphasize that this is arguably the same method (facial similarity) being attempted twice, rather than two different and independent methods. While a marginal improvement, each attempt could go wrong for shared or similar reasons--for example, facial-recognition AI can also suffer from the "all those minorities look alike" problem.

Consider the contrast between:

1. "A human who saw the culprit's face believes your face matches, and a computer looking at video-footage agreed."

2. "A human who saw the culprit's face believes yours matches, and your car is the same color and model as the car the culprit drove off in."

I would be very curious which of the above options is more accurate, I don't think it is open-and-shut that the 2nd would be.

Obviously computer + car make would be the best combo?

good thing eyewitness identification is very accurate, it'd be a shame if the status quo approach caused more false arrests than the alternative

Wait, having a computer saying that your face matches a video does not prove that you are the person on the video. Sure, the police can talk to you, but that is not a sufficient piece of evidence.

people have been convicted and sentenced to decades in prison on the basis of less evidence. see Anthony J. Broadwater, for instance

Okay, in that case, the victim (as sole witness) said that she recognized the defendant as the perpetuator. I am not a lawyer, but not sure if nowadays you could go to jail just because a victim (and sole witness) recognize you ? That seems rather slim evidence, and could be weaponized.

This would be a fantastic circumstance to absolutely not speak to any law enforcement personnel, by the way.

If I have to chose between a state where that dude with the knife is still at large, and a state where people are too afraid of dissent because they're worried about their attendance at a protest showing up on their public record, I'll take the dude with the knife.

Well, in many places in the US, you already have both.

Yeah, having police say, we could find out who the guy charging towards someone with a knife is, bland we have the technology, but we can’t do it is not likely to be a winning political argument.

I am also in favor of catching violent criminals. And as such I join you in the downvote fest. Of course, no one puts forth a cogent argument about why catching violent criminals with this technology is bad. Can it be abused? Yes. Was it abused here? No. Luckily, we live in a democracy where we make the rules. If we want a policy that law enforcement can't buy these systems, make that the law. If we want a policy where law enforcement can't use these systems in any capacity, then make that the law.

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