Facial Recognition Pitches In To Help Cops Arrest A Maryland Man For A Crime He Didn’t Commit
from the there's-no-do-no-harm-requirement-for-cops dept
Facial recognition tech needs more work. It’s not great. Even when it’s good, it’s still pretty bad. While it performs well when identifying people not often considered to be criminal suspects (middle-aged white men), it’s far less accurate when identifying everyone else (minorities, women).
Cops don’t often see what the problem is. Their job usually involves harassing/arresting minorities, so anything that lends itself to business as usual is considered capable and competent.
This tech is now law enforcement mainstream. And it’s doing what critics said it would do: resulting in bogus arrests predicated on nothing more than digital conclusions drawn by underperforming tech.
What’s been seen elsewhere in the nation has now been observed in Maryland. According to this report by Khari Johnson for Wired, facial recognition tech has played an integral part in another wrongful arrest of an innocent person.
Alonzo Sawyer was arrested for an assault and theft he didn’t commit. The software said his face matched the CCTV footage. But focusing on Sawyer’s face ignored everything else about the suspect captured on video. Fortunately for Alonzo, his wife (Carronne Sawyer) went to bat for him after he was arrested.
Carronne drew attention to details in photos on her phone taken recently by her daughter. Her husband is taller than the suspect in the video, she explained, and has facial hair and gaps between his teeth. His right foot slews out when he walks, something she did not see in video footage of the attack.
“I said my husband is 54 years old. This guy looks like he could be our son,” Carronne says.
All of these differences were ignored by the tech and the person operating it, the Maryland Transit Administration Police’s “intelligence analyst.” Both the tech and the human backstop ignored obvious discrepancies, like the fact that Alonzo Sawyer was seven inches taller and 20 years older than the second person the MTA eventually arrested, Deon Ballard.
Thanks to this failure, Maryland state senator, Charles Syndor, is, once again, seeking to block facial recognition tech use by government agencies. His first attempt, mounted in 2021, failed to go anywhere. With a wrongful arrest now on the record, Senator Syndor figures this is the best time to push legislation seeking to regulate law enforcement use of unproven (and unregulated) tech.
If passed, the legislation will do more than curtail MTA’s careless wielding of the powerful, but inaccurate, tech. The Baltimore PD is a fan of facial recognition and wholeheartedly embraces its arrival. According to public defender Deborah Levi, public records show the Baltimore PD ran more than 800 facial recognition searches in 2022 alone — a twice-a-day occurrence that doesn’t appear to have resulted in more meaningful arrests. Then again, it also didn’t result in more bogus arrests, which is the sort of thing that can be considered a win, even if it just means the faulty tech wasn’t abused.
Until cops are willing to be honest and open about this tech, they shouldn’t be trusted with it. And no cop agency should be allowed to use nothing more than a purported match to obtain arrest warrants or stop citizens going about their daily business. The tech is too raw to trust. And if cops think it actually works as well as advertised, it’s only because they want their preexisting biases to be confirmed.
Filed Under: alonzo sawyer, facial recognition, false arrest, maryland, maryland transit administration police
Comments on “Facial Recognition Pitches In To Help Cops Arrest A Maryland Man For A Crime He Didn’t Commit”
Now think of Devin Nunes, the Internet cow, facial age verification and face recognition… shudder.
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I’d rather not.
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*udder
🤣
This will be a long term problem, sadly. Some people will welcome the ambiguity or false positives known of a system to distract from their own prejudices. Computer told them to, it’s not that they wanted a guy or they hate a race, they were just following orders, so to speak.
Whether they’re deliberately passing the buck or they genuinely just did what the computer said is almost irrelevant, when it says Buttle and not Tuttle, someone is in trouble despite the evidence in front of them.
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Not simply “following orders”. Once they make an arrest, they can say they have a suspect in custody, they have action on the case.
… even if that action on the case results in a multi-million dollar settlement later, THEY aren’t paying the settlement.
You might not be able to block them from using it because the public will fall for the hype & fear…
The much better solution is when it is wrong, there is an award paid to the falsely accused that is very public and very large.
Imagine putting the accused in this case in front of a judge to look at him and the video & the questions the Judge would ask about when the human reviewer was declared legally blind.
Until there is a penalty that hurts, they will keep pushing tech to be the answer even when the tech is a complete failure.
Re: Hype and fear
Exactly, and the media doesn’t help. I can’t watch ‘FBI’ (CBS on Tuesday night) because, well one reason why, they use facial recognition at least once an episode. And its never wrong!
Even worse, on the ‘International’ version they had a program that would construct a face from a voice recording and then used facial reconstruction to match that face. Even the Europol cop they work with didn’t believe it.
When the easily bamboozeled public sees this they don’t want to listen to stories like this one where the tech didn’t perform miracles.
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One famously atrocious show (I forget which) featured them trying to “hack” harder, so two people started typing furiously on the same keyboard. There’s always the notorious “enhance, enhance” trope where people zoom into a fuzzy video until they get a crystal clear image of something reflected in a person’s eyes that reveals the real criminal.
It’s all fun and games until someone who falls for that stuff is in the jury, and the US seems to have a culture that tells people that if they end up in the jury they failed at something anyway.
There’s already been so much abuse of DNA evidence I shudder to think of the consequences of facial recognition, but when you have people driving into rivers because their GPS told them to, blind allegiance to facial recognition is probably inevitable.
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The problem with that is that police departments- have no money of their own. Those very large awards you suggest would be paid with other people’s money – losing money that was never yours and never would be yours doesn’t hurt at all.
Re: Re: Taxpayers...
Are also voters. Voters who flatly refuse to shorten the reigns on the cops. Well, big expenses are the obvious and predictable cost of not electing leaders willing to take on their own enforcers.
Re: One million taxpayer money vs twenty-thousand personal money
The much better solution is when it is wrong, there is an award paid to the falsely accused that is very public and very large.
If fines worked law enforcement departments wouldn’t keep paying them out.
No if you want to motivate them to stop using garbage tech and/or start respecting laws and rights you can drop the fine amount to a painful but modest amount you just need to make it personal, because it’s one thing to accuse someone of a crime when the department is on the hook should it turn out they were innocent but it’s something else entirely when bank accounts of the individual officers in question are on the line for it.
Cops love wonky facial recognition for the same reason they love those $2 drug field test kits that have a false-positive rate over 50% – their goal isn’t to catch actual criminals, their goal is to fill the holding cells to prove their job is vital to society.
If a court later drops 99% of all the charges police generate, that’s on the courts, not the cops.
So in other words, the Maryland cops are fans of what can only be described as Faecal Recognition. Yes, it’s shitty at its job. But what the heck, it’s genuine computer Faecal Recognition.
I expect, if the Marylanders can be arsed to save their sanity, for protestors with placards with pictures of cops faces placed next to pictures of faeces, and above it, the legend, “Faecal Recognition Works”.
“Until cops are willing to be honest and open”
HAHAHA
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They sometimes are, they are entirely honest and open when they say “I’m gonna fuck you up!”
One drug dogs opinion on this...
“We were equally unreliable but at least we were not racist!”