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posted by janrinok on Friday May 24 2019, @10:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the facing-up-to-it dept.

Until recently Americans seemed willing to let police deploy new technologies in the name of public safety as they saw fit. But crime is much rarer than it was in the 1990s, and technological scepticism is growing. On May 14th San Francisco became the first American city to ban its agencies from using facial-recognition systems. That decision was profoundly unpopular at the police conference. Jack Marks, who manages Panasonic’s public-safety products, called it “short-sighted and reactive”. The technology exists, he said; “the best thing you can do is help shape it.” Other cities, including Somerville in Massachusetts, may soon follow San Francisco’s lead all the same.

Companies are under scrutiny, too. On May 22nd Amazon saw off two challenges by activist shareholders. They wanted the board to commission an independent study to determine whether Rekognition, its facial-recognition platform, imperils civil, human and privacy rights. The activists also wanted to ban the firm from selling Rekognition to governments until the company’s board concludes, “after an evaluation using independent evidence”, that it does not erode those rights.

Senior police officers argue that the technology is a useful crime-fighting tool. Daniel Steeves, chief information officer for the Ottawa Police Service, says that a robbery-investigation unit spent six months testing a facial-recognition system. It lowered the average time required for an officer to identify a subject from an image from 30 days to three minutes. The officers could simply run an image through a database of 50,000 mugshot photos rather than leafing through them manually or sending a picture to the entire department and asking if anybody recognised the suspect. Other officers stress that a facial-recognition match never establishes guilt. It is just a lead to be investigated.

Yet officers sense that the technology is in bad odour. A deputy police chief from an American suburb with a security system that uses facial recognition around the local high school says: “We knew that facial recognition wasn’t going to fly, so we called it an Early Warning Detection System.”

[...] Chris Fisher, executive director of strategic initiatives for the Seattle Police Department, recently oversaw the building of a data system linking previously siloed streams of information, such as emergency-call records, stops based on reasonable suspicion, and police use of force. This let the department know precisely where disparities occur. Before, says Mr Fisher, they often relied on guesswork and anecdotal evidence to fill in the blanks. “Now we can know: in how many of our dispatches did it end up that a person was in crisis, and in that subset, how often did we use force?”

Axon, which makes body-worn cameras and Tasers (the police weapon that gave the firm its former name) is building a system for managing records. Jenner Holden, the firm’s chief information-security officer, says that “what we can do to help officers improve most isn’t the sexy stuff. It’s helping them be more efficient and spend more time on the street.” 


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  • (Score: 2) by Booga1 on Sunday May 26 2019, @05:14PM

    by Booga1 (6333) on Sunday May 26 2019, @05:14PM (#847917)

    I'm right there with you. Those are a lot of the reasons I dismissed all the people saying they saw someone that looked like me. Never any details.
    Anyway, there was the one time that someone finally had a picture of my supposed doppelganger. I couldn't tell how tall he was, but he had approximately the same build as me, looked about the same age range, had the same hair style and color, and facial structure. If they dressed up like me and posed next to me, I might actually have to think about it before picking which one is which. It was really spot on.

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