Wrongly arrested because of facial recognition: Why new police tech risks serious miscarriages of ju

[Eugene]

Source: The Independent

Wrongly arrested because of facial recognition: Why new police tech risks serious miscarriages of justice

The latest generation of police surveillance tools are overused, underregulated and often completely wrong, opponents tell Josh Marcus and Alex Woodward

11 hours ago

On 16 February, Porcha Woodruff was helping her children get ready for school when six Detroit police officers arrived at her door. They told her she was under arrest for a January carjacking and robbery. She was so shocked she wondered for a moment if she was being pranked.

-snip-

She later learned police identified her as a suspect after running security footage through the department’s facial recognition software, relying on a 2015 mugshot from a past traffic arrest into a photo lineup where the carjacking victim singled out Ms Woodruff as her assailant.

The Detroit Police Department eventually dropped the case, but the arrest has deeply shaken Ms Woodruff.

-snip-

The case underscores the growing risks of civil rights violations as police departments and law enforcement agencies across the country increasingly adopt facial-recognition and other mass surveillance technologies, often used as an unreliable shortcut around methodical human police work.

Criminal justice advocates and the people targeted by this burgeoning police tech argue these programmes are riddled with the same biases and opaque or nonexistent oversight measures plaguing policing at large.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/facial-recognition-technology-police-arrests-b2413116.html

Alternate non-walled link: https://news.yahoo.com/wrongly-arrested-because-facial-recognition-140834517.html

[stopdiggin]

1. all too true

but we should probably also highlight that the eyewitness (carjack victim) also made a positive ID from a photo lineup. So - unreliable ID is kind of a widespread problem - and not a unique to software algorithms. Humans themselves cannot reliably remember and identify ...

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

2. Software has a long way to go.

Ground vehicle autopilot
Facial recognition
Shotspotter

Automated surveillance as whole is less than ideal, maybe even counterproductive since some of these mechanisms identify people with a strong resemblance as well as identical to a search image.