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Privacy Technology

New Yorkers in High Stop-and-Frisk Areas Subject To More Facial Recognition Tech (theguardian.com) 61

New Yorkers who live in areas where controversial stop-and-frisk searches happen most frequently are also more likely to be surveilled by facial recognition technology, according to research by Amnesty International and other researchers. From a report: Research also showed that in the Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens boroughs of the city there was a direct correlation between the proportion of non-white residents and the concentration of controversial facial recognition technology. "Our analysis shows that the NYPD's use of facial recognition technology helps to reinforce discriminatory policing against minority communities in New York City," said Matt Mahmoudi, artificial intelligence and human rights researcher at Amnesty International. The research is a part of the global anti-facial recognition technology campaign, Ban the Scan, investigating increasing use of surveillance initiatives in the New York police department (NYPD). Using thousands of digital volunteers through the Decode NYC Surveillance project, more than 25,500 CCTV cameras were mapped across New York City. Data scientists and researchers from Amnesty International compared the data on the camera placement with statistics on police stop-and-frisk. "We have long known that stop-and-frisk in New York is a racist policing tactic. We now know that the communities most targeted with stop-and-frisk are also at greater risk of discriminatory policing through invasive surveillance," said Mahmoudi.
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New Yorkers in High Stop-and-Frisk Areas Subject To More Facial Recognition Tech

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  • Didn't stop and frisk end in New York?

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/a... [nbcnews.com]

    • by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
      New Mayor [wikipedia.org]... who also happens to be an ex-cop
      • Defunding the police didn't work. Big shock, I know. And that's why he got voted in.

        There's actually only one city that is doing something interesting, and it wasn't the city leadership that did it on their own. Texas banned any cities from reducing police funding, which is exactly what the Austin leadership wanted to do.

        So instead Austin was forced to reevaluate how police are trained and focus their effort towards better training. Basically what should have been done to begin with rather than this stupid

        • I'm curious what you think defunding the police actually means? The really hypocritical part is Texas not allowing cities to reduce police funding. What happened to the cries of big government=bad and allowing cities to budget as they see fit? Hypocrites to the very end.

          Wonder how fast they would cancel open carry if BLM started doing it? Reagan and the NRA already did that in California when the Black Panthers wanted to open carry firearms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

          • The right wing in American politics is not ever going to argue in good faith, because their position is usually unsupportable.
            The question I have is how any police force in America can "stop and frisk"? I thought you guys had constitutional protections against that sort of thing?
            • The cops only frisk brown people so republicans are ok with it. Start frisking bearded chubby guys in cargo shorts and that shit would stop overnight.

          • I'm curious what you think defunding the police actually means?

            Well let's see:

            /dfnd/
            verb: defund; 3rd person present: defunds; past tense: defunded; past participle: defunded; gerund or present participle: defunding; verb: de-fund; 3rd person present: de-funds; past tense: de-funded; past participle: de-funded; gerund or present participle: de-funding

            prevent from continuing to receive funds.

            What's it supposed to mean?

            Oh wait no, I get it, this is one of those pissed off progressive hyperbole moments where they say they want one thing, but really mean they want something else, and the expectation is that you're supposed to be smarter than they are. Kind of like how they always ask for socialism but they don't actually know what the word means, nor do they understand that nordic countries aren't actually socialist or anything even resembling it.

            Fret not, I'm already way ahead of

    • Didn't stop and frisk end in New York?

      They enacted an even more controversial program in its place - Stop and Kiss [huffpost.com].

  • So Person of Interest was both entertainment and a profitable cover story.
  • High crime areas? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SecurityTheatre ( 2427858 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @11:42AM (#62269517)

    If you deploy tech STRICTLY in high-crime areas, wouldn't it also "appear" to be racially biased?

    So if you deploy tech strictly on racial lines, you'll have an unequal "cameras per crime rate" deployment?

    So you either:

    - deploy them randomly (useless waste of money)
    - deploy them by statistical crime data (and then get called racist)
    - deploy them based on racial demographics, trying hard to avoid racial inequality and ignoring crime data (missing out on deploying in high crime areas)

    I mean... other than banning law enforcement tech, which solution is the best?

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by iamnotx0r ( 7683968 )
      Soft on crime is the solution, till eventually the public comes to realize, crime has no racial bias, it just exists in some places more than other places.
      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Indeed.

        The fact that 14% of the population commits 90% of violent crime has NOTHING to do with race.

        • See subject.

        • That same small percentage of the population also constitutes an oversized share of the VICTIMS of violent crime. Which is why, in spite of occasional abuses, that subset of the population tends to enthusiastically support good policing, even if they also take serious offense at bad policing.

          Also, having grown up in the inner city myself, I am with them 1000% on this.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        Soft on crime is the solution, till eventually the public comes to realize, crime has no racial bias, it just exists in some places more than other places.

        I'd love to see someone like a senator have the stop and frisk treatment applied to them. It's constitutionally questionable at best and likely does nothing but garner animosity towards the already unpopular police.

      • Soft on crime is the solution

        The American Tough On Crime technique has now landed Americans with the largest prison population in the world, and by far the highest incarceration rate per capita. But it hasn't done wonders for the crime rate. It has done a lot for profits of prison companies and companies selling military style kit to police forces. So there's that.

        • No. The "war on drugs" which redefined crime is what filled the prisons and continues to do so.

          One of my VERY few agreements with the political left is that this "war" needs to be wound down ASAP, and nonviolent drug offenders need to be pardoned and helped to transition back into society.

          Violent criminals do need to be separated from society at least until they are provably rehabilitated, but occasional pot smokers do not.

      • Like magic!

        No, crime rates are related things that happened in the past. Historically, racism has created less opportunities for some groups of people, which means crime became a valid career by necessity.

        The challenge is to stop this feedback loop, and not to reinforce it further.

        Let's also remember that not all crime happens on low-income streets. White collar crime can have a significant impact on people's lives. It's just harder to spot with a surveillance camera.

      • "Soft on crime" - sounds nice, unless you are the victim of a violent attack by a serial-criminal who was released w/o bail this morning after beating up a woman, only to attack another woman later that afternoon.

        Please, define "soft on crime", because as currently practiced in numerous cities (NYC, SF, LA,Chicago, etc) it is not reducing crime.

        As currently practiced, "soft on crime" is hard on the victim.

    • Re:High crime areas? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @12:08PM (#62269589)

      Solution is to make more attempts and effort to address the root causes of the crime and not just react with more policing.

      Part of the idea of systemic bias is an acknowledgement that minority neighborhoods do tend to have higher crime numbers but that this also creates a feedback loop. A slightly higher crime area gets more police assigned, who are then able to find more crime just by nature of there being more cops around, which increases the crime numbers and therefore they send more cops, and on and on...

      There is an abundance of evidence drawing links between poverty and inequality with crime and chances of incarcertation. Top this with the war on drugs (which carries it's own racial bias issues) and you essentially create perpetual cycles of crime and incarcertation, and high incarcertation rates lead to future generations having higher probabilities of crime and incarceration. Top it all off with schools being funded by property taxes and poor areas tend to have worse educational outcomes which leads to more crimes etc etc.

      Anyone who says there is not high crime rates in minority groups is lying. It's there and it's obvious but the question is "why" and what do we do about it. More cops, more laws and more prisons certainly has a decades long track record of failure. Addressing poverty and inequality is addressing the by far largest correlative factor to crime. The only one larger is just men who commit by far the lions share of all crime.

      • To me the root cause is not racism but poverty, it breads more poverty, unfortunately black people for historical reasons are poorer. While I agree that the solution more than just policing, it involves creating an environment where people are more capable of lifting themselves out of poverty. However statements like "defund police", give the immediate impression that you want to remove policing completely. While there are people like you who are sensible and think it means we need to also address the core

        • No one ever accused leftists of having good optics. Defund was a terrible motto that got turned into a cudgel to hit Democrats with and many of them just let themselves take the beating. The concept is good (redirect bloated police budgets to social programs, community policing efforts, social workers ride along with cops etc etc) but the motto is awful.

          Ironically it was mostly a "white" thing as many black leaders and communities actually have a more nuanced opinion of police and are far more on the side

    • they can place them around my house, I would not mind a constant police protection of the place.
      that way if some crime does happen they will be there protecting the victim.
    • The current soft-on-crime laws are a feature, not a bug. The voters in states that have them are getting EXACTLY what they voted for. As H.L. Mencken said, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

      You can argue about the reasons why, but it's absolutely not up for debate that more violent crime is conducted at higher rates per-capita by members of certain races. The FBI publishes these statistics every year [fbi.gov] for all to see. What's happened

      • Whats has happened is the American public has been fed a bunch of half truths, and that any address to crime is racist.

        This racism rant/propaganda, has been successfully applied in all areas of daily life.

        Employment - racism
        Education - racism
        Crime - racism
        Wealth - racism
        Voting - racism
        Parents - racism

        It is immoral now, low class thinking, uneducated to see the obvious.
        • Also, this propaganda has greatly hindered the fight against real racism.

          If people call everything "racist," then, eventually, the term ceases to have any real meaning, and society ends up divided between those who think everything is racist, versus those who think nothing is racist.

          Neither of these things is true, so they've also divided both groups against not only each other, but also against those perceptive enough to see that some things are at least arguably racist, whereas other things are at least a

    • If you deploy tech STRICTLY in high-crime areas, wouldn't it also "appear" to be racially biased?

      That has racist* implications.

      *The new, improved definition of racism that has no actual semantic meaning whatsoever - much more versatile

    • - deploy them randomly (useless waste of money)

      No, deploy them evenly throughout the city.

      - deploy them by statistical crime data (and then get called racist)

      The problem with this idea is that relying on the "statistical crime data" creates a positive feedback loop [wikipedia.org] because you are only looking for crime in areas you expect it while ignoring crime that happens elsewhere. The net result is disproportionate policing which promotes a lack of trust in police which leads to a lack of respect for the law. It's a vicious cycle and it's difficult to stop but the first step is building trust in the community and you can't do th

      • So parkland in Staten Island needs the same camera density as Flatbush or Bed-Stuy or East Harlem or the South Bronx?

        Good luck selling that one.

        BTW, that makes life WORSE for those in the bad neighborhoods, without making it better for anyone, other than maybe camera vendors.

        • Financial crime is committed mostly by rich white people but you don't see them being policed, even though consequences of those crimes don't really "scare" the public on TV news, but affect them in various ways such as higher prices, loss of property etc causing more poverty.

    • by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

      deploy them based on racial demographics, trying hard to avoid racial inequality and ignoring crime data (missing out on deploying in high crime areas

      You've skipped a step so your phrasing looks like a silly caricature, but the central idea is self-evidently best. Think of it mathematically. After adjusting for crime levels and race and poverty, each deployment of a face-scanning camera should affect people equally. Anything else is just stomping your boot harder on people who are already in the dirt.

      Note: I said "after adjusting for crime levels and race and poverty". That doesn't mean that you ignore crime data. It means you have to judge whether your

  • Maybe they can leverage Pixel 6's Real Tone technology to better capture the faces of suspects in these areas?

  • by kenh ( 9056 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @04:44PM (#62270677) Homepage Journal

    "Stop and frisk" and facial recognition are targeted tools intended to aid in reducing crime in a particular area - deploying such a tool broadly is wasteful.

    It's interesting to note that the ACLU & others only considered race when looking at where these tools were deployed. They left out the logical reason the tools were deployed to certain areas - increased levels of crime that were (arguably) reduced in the neighborhoods thanks in part to these tools...

    • No one ever stops to think about the race of the VICTIMS.

      I'm for fair but aggressive policing, focused on exactly the areas that need it most, and also for locking up violent criminals (after due process of law, which I realize is a problem as well) until they are either rehabilitated, or dead.

      Not because of the race of the perpetrators, but because, regardless of race, people deserve to be safe.

  • by rbrander ( 73222 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @06:51PM (#62271097) Homepage

    ...well, not really a suggestion, just a remark in his book 'I Can't Breathe', about the Eric Garner death, that the NYPD could also reliably make a hundred drug busts every Friday night by doing a stop and frisk outside Wall St. financial firms. "Inside Job" was very plain about the sheer ubiquity of cocaine in the trading floors.

    Taibbi didn't suggest it, because, well, The Very Idea.

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