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One Piece of Flock Camera Data Put This Innocent Woman in Jail for 13 Days
(jezebel.com)
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by HotGarbage
by HotGarbage
This is also comparable to self-driving car: Waymo's system has achieve the level of "less error than human on average" long time ago, but they are still only doing slow expansion. Why? Because when AI is involved, human naturally expect them to be almost 100% correct, not just barely better than human, otherwise why bother use AI (and all the troubles to legalize for AI) in the first place? So in this case, I guess the police just blindly trust the AI being 99.99% correct.
It’s a camera system, and data can be queried by police. They have to search for something. So the cops searched for a vehicle matching the description in the general area, seemed to take the first one, and called it a day.
That’s not an AI-uncanny-valley. That’s the equivalent of (pre-flock/cameras) looking at vehicle registration list and assuming the one at the top of the list must be it.
The automation-trust is a legitimate concern but it’s not applicable here.
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If a random person walks into a police station and accuses a random stranger of murder, and the police put that stranger in jail based on that alone, the main problem is not the accuser.
I have never released a single product that has seen people die through common user misuse.
The standards for solutions shouldn't get _lower_ as the stakes get _higher_.
If a private company can puts hundreds of tons of payload into orbit without ever causing someone to accidentally be imprisoned a company that sells cameras on a stick shouldn't either.
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Flock didn't fail to inspect the car for damage and not find any, flock didn't take 13 days to conduct a cursory review of evidence, flock didn't fail to request cell tower triangulation data and rule out her being in the location of the accident...
I get that people feel their privacy's invaded by being filmed, but this story doesn't appear to have any more to do with Flock than what the officers had for breakfast or the brand of air freshener she had in her car at the time.
I expect the solution they will settle on is to form a department for interacting with technology like this, who understand its outputs are not edicts.
you can't really expect any meaningful police reforms (such as liability and insurance) because anyone who is in any position to enact them is perfectly fine with dumb muscle that holds a monopoly on violence and is deferential to them. in fact the public disliking the police is an ideal outcome for those decision makers as it gives them more leverage over the police.
The accusation that some machine made any decision here goes beyond the reporting in the article. It seems concocted to raise AI alarm. All we have is that it supplied accurate data that police then abused. That isn't in the vicinity of "outsource[d] basic critical thinking to machines".
I want such general government surveillance banned, but the machines in this story had no more volition than a breathalyzer.
You give it automated to jump to conclusions...
Conclusion is predictable
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The problem is the police-camera system, of which the camera is an instrumental component
This is literally the first sentence of the article.
You can dislike public surveillance, but statements like "Flock camera data put this woman in jail for 13 days" blatantly ignores the the fact that Flock didn't put anyone in jail, a bunch of cops who very clearly knew that it wasn't her.
> The Flock camera, meanwhile, had recorded Isaacs’ car and its license plate several miles away from the site of the accident, sometime around the time of the incident.
Blaming a tool, when the cops in question are clearly willing to grasp to whatever piece of "evidence" makes their job "easier" is a giant cop-out and excuse for the people who are abusing it.
Any piece of evidence requires some form of critical examination; that is what law enforcement's job is. If you're just going to go with the first theory/piece-of-evidence they find.... they're not doing their job (and violating peoples constitutional rights through sheer laziness).
Yes, but it is still your fault. “I am dumb and I was deceived” is no valid defense, least of all for a police officer.
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But seriously, privacy must not become a sided issue. Attacks on privacy are bipartisan, the defense of it would be weakened if it was not bipartisan. Civil liberties protected by the constitution should not be controversial.
With dumb camera footage, the cops looks at the plates, visual indicators, etc. That does not make them more competent or less prone to abuse. But here, Flock's software literally told them this woman was the one they were looking for, despite no evidence supporting this.
This is 100% both on the police and on Flock. Some technologies don't deserve to exist. Facial recognition and ALPR is one of those, because the error rates are too high and the stakes are too high.
Nor does Flock - Flock merely provides a photo and timestamp, which should have been scrutised like any other evidence.
The Flock data showed:
- Car of same make/model nearby at similar time to the accident
- Possible colour match (eyewitnesses gave varying reports on the colour of the perpetrating vehicle). But a match could have been ruled out in minutes had police inspected paint transfer onto the struck vehicle
- A number plate non-match (first three characters were reported to 911 and did not match)
- That's all!
So police didn't do their job (scutinise the evidence), and possibly worse, they may have fabricated evidence (since police claimed Isaacs' vehicle was damaged, but it was in factory-new condition) - which may explain why they're shifting blame to Flock!
Could they have, you know, double checked it? Yes, obviously. But they didn't.
I agree that this story is more about the incredible incompetence of the police involved than flock attempting to record everyone and everything, but flock giving the police an excuse to stop looking and arrest an innocent is by no means irrelevant.
- Does anything connect this vehicle to the accident?
- Did it look damaged; as though it had been in a crash?
- Did it look like it was fleeing or driving erratically?
- Was there anything suspicious about the vehicle or the driver?
Police would have deemed the photo irrelevant and moved on. But that didn't happen in this case.
Their failure to do so doesn't have to do with source of the image (Flock, shop CCTV, dashcam), but with their inexplicable lack of rigour.
Can you give an account of the lack of rigor, or is it some kind of holy mystery?
Their conclusion (after 5 minutes) would have been (obviously) that there’s not so much as a strand of chewing gum connecting the car to the accident, or making it stand out from dozens of others, and they’d promptly get back to searching for the car that actually was involved.
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As far as I know, it lets law enforcement query for things against the data. Can be specific (like a license plate) or more general (like a dark colored mid-sized SUV around <location> at <time>).
To get where this story is at, cops here must have done the latter, and taken the first name off the top of the pile and patted themselves on the back, and then waited 7 months, and went and arrested her. Unless there’s an explanation for a 7 month delay, it seems designed to allow defensive evidence to spoil.
There isn’t an uncanny-valley of automation here. There is just lazy, grossly-incompetent, bad-faith, and malicious cops/investigators.
Guns can be used for all sorts of things. A handgun in a house is likely to be used for murder/suicide.
"Flock is bad" metonymizes the situation, but doesn't let anyone off the hook.
This situation the equivalent of an eye-witness saying "Ya, I think it might have been this person I know, Tom!" and a cop/prosecutor taking that at face value and arresting Tom (and the system that allowed that to happen).
The people who make decisions and take action so (grossly) negligently need to be held accountable and face consequences. Blaming the tool (whatever tool it is) is giving the people who have the actual responsibility an escape hatch to avoid accountability.
There will always be cops willing to misuse whatever they have access to.
Part of it is holding cops accountable in these situations. Part of it is limiting or stopping the use of these systems so cops don't have as many opportunities to abuse them.
No one is letting cops off the hook.
The headline is what 99% of people read, and remember.
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Critical examination is the judiciary's job, not the police's. Jordan v. City of New London established that police departments can and do deny employment to prospective officers who possess excessive cognitive ability.
All public defenders and most prosecutors are happy to admit anonymously that the justice system is 90% gears grinding people. They ALL know an innocent person that pled guilty to end the grinding. Judges too. You can find plenty of court videos on YouTube of people pleading guilty while saying they didn’t do it but need to get on with their life. The judge will explain to them that they can’t accept a guilty plea from someone who claims innocence, and the defendant then folds. Everyone in the room knows that there is more to the story, but no one is willing to do the work.
There is no real mechanism for holding them accountable and the consequences of these tools include death (it only takes one perceived wrong move for officers thinking they've bagged a felon to ventilate you. Hell not even that, see that officer who mag dumped his own car after he mistook an acorn for a gunshot.) This lady is quite lucky that it was only 13 days, if she had a career that's probably hosed but it might not be totally life ruining if she has a strong support system.
If punishing bad actors alone was enough we wouldn't have a ton of 4th amendment case law.
When it is made pretty clear that as a cop you won't face consequences for your malicious and/or incompetent actions, you're going to select for people who find that very appealing. Similarly, the people who don't like that kind of system might leave, allowing for a reinforcement the malicious and/or incompetent behavior.
Corrupt, arrogant, bigoted, or with a superiority complex? Way more than half.