That seems perfectly reasonable?
Or what about this? A man covered his face when walking past one of these vans in a public street. He protested and was then fined £90 for swearing (swearing is not illegal but The Pubic Order Act is another law that is often abused by police but that's tangential)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/facial-recogniti...
Of course, all this assume US police have consequences for breaking the rules. So this is unfortunately moot.
Simply going out looking for people of interest in east London is perfectly fine, we call it "police work" and have done it for bloody ages.
Maybe instead we could issue officers with a deck of cards with 52 faces on them and they can use that as a comparison point? Seems pretty inefficient to me but im only a tax paying pleb what would i know.
Police surveillance should be inefficient. People do not exist to be arbitrarily inspected at scale; it should be an expensive, manual process and you should be forced to choose carefully whom you target, by necessity keeping that list small and limited to those for whom you can articulate cause.
If you're taking money from the public and spending it you should be legally bound to use it in the most efficient and effective way possible.
Snark aside, surveys are quite literally the least efficient means of gathering a sample. Scanning random people on the street when a known criminal is likely to lay low and stay inside. I can't imagine expensive surveillance cameras is cheaper than paying an investigator to track down a suspect.
Let's ignore the privacy implications as not all countries have an expectation of privacy outside windowless closed private spaces. How is this meaningfully different from a general stop and frisk policy? Sure, this adds a non-physical filter before the physical police interaction but it's still a widespread warrantless search. How does this work with the presumption of innocence?
If there was some guarantee all that data wasn't going into some government sanctioned back end, we can start to compare it to police out on the street.
>However, fundamentally, being arrested for looking like someone else is not a new phenomenon.
Was always wrong and still is wrong.
But if you want a modern difference: companies these days (even minimum wage) are really strict about arrests. Even a false arrest can cause complications in a background check, so there is more potential (albeit indirect) slanderous effects from mistaking people nowadays.
I don’t understand this comment. The police sometimes have to arrest people based on descriptions and other fallible data points. It’s unfortunate when the wrong person is arrested (and false arrests should obviously be minimized), but it’s not reasonable to expect police to get this right absolutely 100% of the time. If someone is a fugitive then they are very unlikely to reveal any information that identifies them with certainty.
Also, police in the US use the same technology: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/public_informa...
It's always been wrong and still is wrong, but the reasons changed over the years. Americans have traditionally been adverse to mass surveillance and I don't think that changes much today. The government just does it in sneaker ways nowadays.