There aren’t enough details here to tell whether or not this system is truly useful. If its false negative rate is good and other methods successfully detect t

There aren’t enough details here to tell whether or not this system is truly useful. If its false negative rate is good and other methods successfully detect the false positives, like traditional detective work, using it as a screening tool reduces the number of people that need to be investigated by a factor of 200 or so^. However, those are a lot of assumptions— there’s lots of ways this could actually be as bad as it looks on the surface: - Is the output of this system being used as evidence in a courtroom instead of a lead generator? - Is there some systematic bias in the false positives that result in a particular class of innocent people being harassed by the police during their investigations? - Does the system reliably include the actual suspect in its set of potential suspects? I’ll refrain from commenting on the social acceptability of this system, as I have never been a part of UK society and thus lack a baseline against which to compare it. ^My brain is refusing to do the arithmetic tonight for some reason.