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Comment by crikli | Hacker News Reader

Blog spam, inaccurate headline.

Original article on npr: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/12/07/166678...

The boost was in 57% of "warrant services" whatever that means, not arrests. No numbers given for the increase in arrests, just that they "actually got more people."

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It means a 57% rise in arrests of those with outstanding warrants. Either the subject was already arrested, released, and didn't show up for court, or a warrant was issued for them by a judge based on a request by an officer and they can't locate the person to arrest them in the first place. Although many of these people were technically already in the system, the effect on the system is the same as a 57% rise in new arrests, since if a wanted person can't be located, they are not using a jail bed, their case is not taking up court docket space, and we aren't paying for their prosecution and in most cases their defense.

That NPR article you point out (which is really way better than this one) claims:

    "Warrant services" is police speak for arrests.

"warrant services" = "serving a warrant".

It means arresting somebody when there is a warrant for their arrest. # of arrests includes when a cop sees somebody doing something and arrests them on the spot, warrant services is only arrests where the cops are out looking for somebody with the intention of arresting them for past crimes.

Thank you for that.

The Pinterest page is here (http://pinterest.com/themercury/wanted-by-police/)

I'd be interested to see if Google (or anyone) tried their face recognition on these photos and provide information to the police.

What information is face recognition going to provide? as per the pinterest page you linked, the police already know the suspect's name and information, they just can't find them. It's unlikely google or anybody else is going to get a current address for these people just by running facial recognition.

The photos which Google (or much more likely, Facebook and Twitter) have often contain embedded geolocation data which gives the police a better idea of where to start looking for the person. Of course, this is a lot more work than posting up the equivalent of virtual wanted posters and having people give information which is more likely to be recent than pictures collected by social networks.

People move and post stuff to facebook. Or their friends post photos to Facebook. Some criminals aren't bright.

(http://www.tampabaycriminaldefenselawyerblog.com/2009/10/sea...)

Muddy waters. What if (when) they fire a false positive?

Well, they'd be saying "This photo looks like the person in the photo you provided".

At the moment police are relying on people saying "I saw some bloke that looked like that photo at this location", so there's not much difference.

Humans are much, much better at pattern matching than computers, they just don't scale.

I have the impression that people are notoriously bad at recognising faces.

You can show a person a photo, and then show them a "6 pack" and they can't find the person in the original photo. And many other examples. I'll try to find some cites to see if I've remembered correctly (and if the studies were any good).

How about a picture of twins?

Obviously you would send both pictures to the police with the name and info of the matched suspect so there would be human confirmation.

The war on drugs looks to be in full swing.

As I've already said (in this thread) just arresting people is probably pointless, and offering people treatment for addiction, and treatment or support for mental ill health is probably a lot cheaper and more effective than just the criminal justice system.

Having said that, did you read the pinterest page? There are some rapists there; and some rapists of children; and some other sex offenders too.

Yes, I had a look. The majority appear to be drug / theft related, a much smaller portion (mostly near the top) are other crimes (more serious).

I'm not sure about the percentage of non-whites vs whites in American jails but there sure seems to be some racial bias here.

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