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.
Modern phrenology.
wow nice to know that from DNA you can predict whether or not a person has a beard, or their style of hair
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?
I know some people who are banned for life for such “haha sry my bad” gov stunts
Considering how common rape is in American prisons and how often innocent people are getting locked up, that does not sound unlikely
Getting a psychic to give them a suspect through the shadow realm or something would probably be more accurate.
Boy that is just a garbage sandwich, garbage in garbage out with twice as much garbage.
“Why, yes. We can tell you are a criminal because of your skull shape”
… And found out that the minority report predicted he was about to commit a crime.
Removed by mod
Next thing you know this will be the new expert witness pseudoscience.
Beat me to the punch, I was saying just as much, considering the history of forensic science in general. It won’t be long before they’re producing bogus “research” to justify it at a new investigative method.
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.
Remember this article when you end up on a jury.
Or sitting behind the defense table.
I can see the abuse but what if this actually worked in a best case scenario? So dna is found say from a rape and that DNA is used to create a image of the person and then they find that person and then do DNA tests to match them. The image is not used as evidence but used to find the person. Honestly it seems like a good use, if it’s limited to that.
Fruit of the poisoned tree
