For facial recognition experts and privacy advocates, the East Bay detective’s request, while dystopian, was also entirely predictable. It emphasizes the ways that, without oversight, law enforcement is able to mix and match technologies in unintended ways, using untested algorithms to single out suspects based on unknowable criteria.
Cops only like technology when they can abuse it to avoid having to do real investigative police work.
They don’t care to understand the technology in any deep manner, and as we’ve seen with body cams, when they retain full control over the technology, it’s basically a farce to believe it could be used to control their behavior.
I mean, on top of that, a lot of “forensic science” isn’t science at all and is arguably a joke.
Cops like using the veneer of science and technology to act like they’re doing “serious jobs” but in reality they’re just a bunch of thugs trying to dominate and control.
In other words, this is just the beginning, don’t expect them to stop doing stuff like this, and further, expect them to start producing “research” that “justifies” these “investigation” methods and see them added to the pile of bullshit that is “fOrEnSiC sCiEnCE.”
TBH: Tech companies are not much different from how you described cops.
They don’t usually bother to learn the tech they are using properly and take all the shortcuts possible. You see this by the current spout of AI startups. Sure, LLMs work pretty good. But most other applications of AI is more like: “LOL, no idea how to solve the problem. I hooked it up to this blackbox, which i don’t understand, and trained it to give me the results i want.”
Didn’t facial recognition get some poor guy arrested and raped in prison and he was completely innocent of everything?
Next thing you know this will be the new expert witness pseudoscience.
Propublica did an article on that.
https://www.propublica.org/article/understanding-junk-science-forensics-criminal-justice
E.g.
The reliability of bloodstain-pattern analysis has never been definitively proven or quantified, but largely due to the testimony of criminalist Herbert MacDonell, it was steadily admitted in court after court around the country in the 1970s and ’80s. MacDonell spent his career teaching weeklong “institutes” in bloodstain-pattern analysis at police departments around the country, training hundreds of officers who, in turn, trained hundreds more.
…
In 2009, a watershed report commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences cast doubt on the discipline, finding that “the uncertainties associated with bloodstain-pattern analysis are enormous,” and that experts’ opinions were generally “more subjective than scientific.” More than a decade later, few peer-reviewed studies exist, and research that might determine the accuracy of analysts’ findings is close to nonexistent.
wow nice to know that from DNA you can predict whether or not a person has a beard, or their style of hair
… And found out that the minority report predicted he was about to commit a crime.
