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Comment by pj_mukh | Hacker News Reader

No licensed engineer can say "Well Claude made this bridge for me, it's not my fault". If you're licensed by the state to carry a gun around, your standard should be higher than that, not lower.

AI has nothing to do with this. Cops have been using facial recognition since the 2010's, computers and databases with glitchy connections even longer than that. AI is just the latest boogeyman hiding the actual issue.

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Still, AI has no place in law enforcement. It's the hammer that is being used to put screws in. It enables injustice at a far larger scale than ever before. See: the TN woman who was extradited to NC, having never been there, for a crime that the AI "face recognition" flagged as her, and the cops did zero actual investigation, they just took the AI at its word and put her in jail for six months. I also remember a man who was jailed for violating someone else's casino trespass under similar reasons. Bodycams in that case showed the cops says "the software is saying it's him 100%"

Edit: it was North Dakota, not North Carolina.

"the TN woman who was extradited to NC,"

Yup, exactly. Look that case up, it had nothing to do with Flock. It was facial recognition software and an old school database built in 2014, so likely not big-data ML (AlexNet hadn't even come out) but classic CV.

Productivity improvements will be needed in all industries. I'd rather have fewer well-paid and well-trained, accountable LEO's that have all the productivity tools they need vs. a mini-army of union-protected tom-dick-harry's grabbed of the street, handed a gun and a database. No thank you.

I'd rather we have cops who are required to actually investigate, versus just taking what a computer program tells them as if it is inerrant gospel

Maybe if the cops can prove they actually did investigation and were only prompted by the AI to do that investigation, I'd agree. But the whole problem is that the cops are blindly using AI to tell them who to arrest, which is such a blatant rights violation that I can't see how anyone could support it and sleep soundly at night

Also, a non-zero number of cops have been using AI to stalk ex-partners. That's just known cases, and it stands to reason there are also a non-zero number of cops who have done it and not been caught. Since a single such case is too many, it needs to stop.

Also, don't forget, "good" cops who aren't reporting bad cops and trying to get them off the force are also really bad cops

(light correction - she was extradited hundreds of miles all the way to Michigan!)

Maybe there were two cases because I thought I remembered hearing about that (or was it Maryland?) but I also remember a similar situation of someone being taken to NC

Edit: the one I was referencing was North Dakota, not NC. But there was a very similar case that I think involved Maryland. The fact that there are multiple cases to confuse in this scenario only emboldens my viewpoint that AI has no place being anywhere near LEO

i confused michigan with north dakota, and it all makes sense now! sorry.

The Maryland case was actually a woman who lived in Oklahoma, not TN. https://statescoop.com/aclu-maryland-police-facial-recogniti...

Are you thinking of this woman who was jailed in Fargo?

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/29/us/angela-lipps-ai-facial-rec...

Ah, that's was it, ND rather than NC. My bad.

See: the TN woman who was extradited to NC, having never been there, for a crime that the AI "face recognition" flagged as her, and the cops did zero actual investigation, they just took the AI at its word and put her in jail for six months.

As has been explained numerous times, this was a problem with the police and the courts, not AI. Get rid of bad cops first, then worry about AI.

I'd rather bad cops not be able to use AI to be worse cops, thank you. I think that's the easier task, because of qualified immunity. AI hallucination is an issue well known to happen widely.

Why not worry about the AI and work to try to get rid of bad cops?

There is no sense in limiting yourself to doing the next-to-impossible task first.

People do have limits, and doing both is inherently harder than doing one. Every ounce of effort spent working on something that isn't the problem takes away from the effort to actually address the problem.

That's completely backwards. The whole point is, giving AI to bad cops only makes things worse.

They are going to get AI, regardless of what you or I or anyone else piling on thinks about it. It will happen. That's how this works. That's how this has always worked. For the cops, it's just a matter of waiting for the right crisis to come along to justify it.

So we need to make sure the people and processes are in place to prevent, recognize, and redress the inevitable abuses.

I think both can be true. Ideally, we should do more to address the social issues that cause people to drink and drive, but revoking licenses is still a good short-term move. We could outlaw AI policing while we work on deeper issues with law enforcement.

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