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This news is over a month old. Portland needs facial recognition. It has criminal rioters regularly breaking the law without any consequence. The city’s leaders
by throwawaysea 6y ago
This news is over a month old. Portland needs facial recognition. It has criminal rioters regularly breaking the law without any consequence. The city’s leadership is allowing violence in the name of political goals to continue unchecked, and is weakening their police department’s ability to uphold the law and enforce it equally upon everyone. Having facial recognition would at least help a department with limited resources act more efficiently. Instead of relying on random luck and memory to spot a suspect while on patrol, it reduces the search to potential matches that have a much higher likelihood of being apprehended and charged.
Those concerned about false positives should keep in mind that there is always a human in the loop to confirm matches - which makes the overall system ultimately no less accurate than a human’s ability to spot a suspect randomly. It doesn’t make sense to arbitrarily limit the use of technology here any less than it would to ban a police department’s access to electricity or other utilities.
You either believe in having a police department (in which case you want it to be effective and efficient) or you don’t believe that and are okay with police being abolished. The gray space in the middle doesn’t make logical sense to me.
- vaccinator 6y agoThey have cops breaking the law everywhere... on video sometime taken by their own camera... and often suffer no consequenses. Not sure how facial recognition would help since they already know who they are.
- toomim 6y agoIn Portland the District Attorney actually has a policy to not punish people breaking the law in protests. So the surveillance video isn't going to matter for protests anyway.
- tadfisher 6y agoThe policy is to drop charges that do not involve violence or destruction of property. 70% of charges resulting from the protest were for city ordinance violations such as trespass.
- tadfisher 6y agoI live in Portland. I march and exercise my Constitutionally-guaranteed right to peaceably assemble. On many occasions, Federal agents and police have preemptively declared peaceful gatherings "riots" and deployed riot-control agents and less-than-lethal munitions unprovoked. In others, they have not waited to declare such or order the crowd to disperse, and deployed tear gas and shot into the crowd anyway. Contrary to what Fox News is telling you, rioting is far from regular and I have yet to witness actual law-breaking beyond resisting arrest or disobeying law enforcement. The DA is dropping 70% of protest-related arrests because they don't involve violence or property damage. So I hope you can understand how little trust I hold in the police to make sure the suspect they caught on camera actually committed a crime. Consider a gray space in the middle where the system of policing we have needs reform before we can trust police with tools that make them more effective at acting against the communities they serve. Police should have been protecting protestors and their rights, but they have been antagonistic and violent from the start.