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I wish I could say that I was shocked that the victim of bad facial recognition is black. I wish I could say that I'm shocked that authorities take the word of

I wish I could say that I was shocked that the victim of bad facial recognition is black. I wish I could say that I'm shocked that authorities take the word of software over looking at the evidence and thinking, "umm, doesn't look like him..." Or perhaps someone did look and said, "meh, they all look the same to me." All I know is that I'm highly skeptical that this white guy would suffer the same fate, even if I were to have a similar criminal record. Facial recognition seems to be the polygraph for a new century. But unlike a polygraph, it mostly false positives only for dark-skinned people. While I'm not quite ready to allow my cynicism to let me think it is an intentional feature, I question how many are demanding a fix.

AmVess 6y ago
The last thing police need are more tools that don't work and they don't understand how to use. That they still use polygraphs should make everyone's hair stand on end.
- tartoran 6y ago
  As I understand polygraphs are used like placebos/intimidation tactic to get the suspects to spill the beans. As far as I know the polygraph isn't accepted as evidence in court unless all parties agree to it. However, the dirtiest thing is to use all kind useless evidence and intimidation techniques to scare otherwise innocent people into taking plea deals. This whole guilty plea saga is a disgrace to the justice system.
  - jonny_eh 6y ago
    > As far as I know the polygraph isn't accepted as evidence in court unless all parties agree to it That's not the only place where they can be used, and cause damage.
  - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
    Correct. It's widely considered inadmissible as evidence in court. They're also rarely used outside of the U.S. AFAIK. Recordings of interrogations that feature them also show that they tend to come along with other appeals to ethos ("this is doctor so-and-so...") and hand-wavey forms of intimidation like touting their "seriousness" or "efficacy". Anything that requires a person to "interpret" its output is likely not very deterministic, and so likely not very reliable for establishing... anything. This is akin to palm reading or graphology. Unfortunately, revealing to the police in such a situation exactly how foolish they look by getting behind such a device isn't exactly advisable either!
    - amiga 6y ago
      The Penn and Teller series, Bullshit, features an episode on polygraph machines and interviewer techniques. It's a good watch.
  - KittenInABox 6y ago
    A failed polygraph while inadmissible in court will still be used by police during their own investigations to confirm or deny their "gut feeling".
    - AmVess 6y ago
      I failed a polygraph. There was a crime at a store, and my name came up when they searched through the ATM records. Police had ample evidence that I was in no way related to the crime, but kept trying to find something to pin on me because of the failed test. Those particular detectives had complete faith in the lie detector as a valid tool of police work. Video evidence of me entering the store, using the atm, and immediately leaving the store? That was not evidence to them because I failed the polygraph. I take an exceedingly dim view of any police department that uses a polygraph in any capacity. They've been proven time and time and time again to be worthless as a tool, but police still use them. The rough equivalent is using tarot cards as a tool for solving crimes.
      - CraneWorm 6y ago
        You assume they wanted truth when in reality they only want confession.
      - syshum 6y ago
        There are many things in law enforcement that have either been proven to be worthless, near worthless or never been proven to be valid... Eye Witness Testimony for example, aside from the fact the people are terrible at recall anyway and High Stress causes memory problems above and beyond the normal memory issues of the human mind, it is very very very easy to manipulate a victim either directly or indirectly to identify the "target" no necessarily the actual criminal police "drug" dogs are another one, it is more or less a blank check to probable cause for a search. Then there is one people never even question because it is the foundation of the legal system, the good old finger print... It always amazes me that with DNA it is always probabilistic, "1 in 4 billion people will have this same DNA" but with Finger Prints is an absolute, Match no match.. Call me crazy but I don't think that position is scientifically valid
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    > the dirtiest thing is to use all kind useless evidence and intimidation techniques to scare otherwise innocent people into taking plea deals They don't even need to do that. They can just lie to you. "Hey, your buddy just totally ratted you out in the other room, you better tell us your side of it if you don't want to take the rap for everything"
    - SerLava 6y ago
      Even worse, they can pretend they have evidence that they don't, pretend they believe the evidence, and pretend it's enough to convict you by itself. They can tell you to just say you were there, and they'll go easy on you. You lie and say you were there, now they have evidence that can actually lock you up, even if you are a random person off the street.
      - bluejekyll 6y ago
        To a degree, but I also think this will be changing over time as more and more innocent people are found to have been convicted on false statements used through coercive lying tactics by the police. For example, in this case police threatened to arrest the mans wife if he didn’t confess to killing his child (a new trial was ordered): https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2014/02/20/police-can-lie-to-suspects-during-interrogations-says-court-of-appeals/ https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2014/02/20/police-can-lie... But they went on to say it was still acceptable to lie to suspects... I imagine this murky area of the law will eventually say that police cannot lie to suspects. The Central Park Five is mentioned in that article and is a blatant example of police lying to coerce testimony and then putting innocent children in prison.
      - syshum 6y ago
        Even Worse than all of that, they can use all of those things, while threatening you with dozens of charges and decades of imprisonment then say "but if you act right now and sign this we will only give you a couple of years and then you will be free" in any other context these tactics themselves would be illegal, and i am firm believer that you can not enforce the law by breaking, and that the police should NEVER how the power to do things the public can not
- pmiller2 6y ago
  See also "touch DNA": https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191026/12493943266/federal-court-says-touch-dna-analysis-is-mostly-guesswork-that-cant-be-used-as-evidence.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191026/12493943266/feder...
gwern 6y ago
Are we looking at the same photos? They look uncannily alike to me, to the point where I'm left wondering if the forged license actually reuses a photo from Parks. (As a double convict in NJ, I suspect his earlier mugshots would not be hard for the forger to get. Certainly no harder than forging a license.)
- crooked-v 6y ago
  "Uncannily"? I don't see it. Different mouth proportions compared to the nose, different cheekbones, different eyebrow lengths...
- sebastien_b 6y ago
  They do look similar (enough to become a potential suspect, though I don't think should be enough for a warrant), and given that police departments don't "protect" their mugshots, I wouldn't be surprised if the picture was indeed reused (or photoshopped). But I really wonder if the same officers that dealt with the suspect also questioned the innocent victim in this case - it seems like this wouldn't be the case (and gross negligence on their part) - those people should've been able to tell them apart (instead of solely relying on the picture they got from the license). I think this is what the judge wanted instead of just the facial recognition "evidence" (which eventually led to the charges being dropped) - something like, oh I don't know, the fingerprints from the abandoned vehicle? Basic investigative work, perhaps?
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    Eh, I wouldn't even say that. I'd say they look similar enough to be put into the same photo lineup, but I wouldn't even drag the guy from the article in to do a physical lineup, much less arrest him.
    - sebastien_b 6y ago
      Agree that a photo alone shouldn’t be enough for an arrest warrant. Like I said - either the officers that dealt with the suspect didn’t deal with/look at the victim, or else they’re blind (or trying to meet a quota).
cgriswald 6y ago
> All I know is that I'm highly skeptical that this white guy would suffer the same fate, even if I were to have a similar criminal record. It is not clear to me that a prosecutor's office which has demonstrated that it is not interested in justice, would have cared about the color of skin in the beginning. They're after low-hanging fruit and maybe establishing facial recognition as 'proof enough'. A poor, white ex-con who can't afford a lawyer might just take a plea deal. I think the point of possible divergence is when the guy lawyer-ed up.
truthwhisperer 6y ago
Maybe most type of criminal activity in that category is done by black persons and they are harder to distinguish due to dark patterns ...
Scoundreller 6y ago
> it mostly false positives only for dark-skinned people. Dunno what the technical reason is, but if there was one, I bet it went something like this: v1: sales 'engineer' says: "Our FR product works great on light skin but terribly on darker skin so we've largely disabled that" and made zero sales. On v2 (version2 or vendor2), they just dialed up the acceptable false positive rate, said "ya, it works on everyone, no problem!" and sold sold sold!
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Part of the reason is likely that black people, particularly dark skinned black people, are just harder to photograph than people of other ethnicities: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/04/16/303721251/light-and-dark-the-racial-biases-that-remain-in-photography https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/04/16/303721251... Edit: I'm placing this higher up in the thread for more visibility, but, for those interested, here are some tips for photographing people with darker skin tones: https://creativecloud.adobe.com/discover/article/10-tips-for-photographing-darker-skin-tones https://creativecloud.adobe.com/discover/article/10-tips-for...
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    That's fine, but the system shouldn't be dialed up to accept more false positive matches, but it sounds like it is being so.
    - pmiller2 6y ago
      Oh, I agree 100%. I'm just saying that maybe the quality of input to the algorithms leaves something to be desired. Or, maybe the fact that there are relatively few black people in tech means that the developers of these algorithms don't even notice that there's a bias to correct for, whether it's in the input or not.
  - dstick 6y ago
    Oh come on! “They” are harder to photograph? This is exactly the same like saying black people are less intelligent because they don’t hold the higher paid jobs. It’s not by choice. Nor is there any physical reason why that should be. The technology to photograph is biased to better capture white skinned people. It even says so in the very article you link to: “A lot of [the design of film and motion technology] was conceived with the idea of the best representation of white people.” Improve the technology!
treeman79 6y ago
If you want variety, iPhone had some trouble with Chinese. https://nypost.com/2017/12/21/chinese-users-claim-iphone-x-face-recognition-cant-tell-them-apart/ https://nypost.com/2017/12/21/chinese-users-claim-iphone-x-f...
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Ugh. You would think Apple would do more testing in one of their largest markets, and the place where iPhones are literally built.
throwaway2245 6y ago
> I'm not quite ready to allow my cynicism to let me think it is an intentional feature Hanlon's razor is hinted at in the later discussion, i.e. "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence" (at least, both the words incompetence and malice appear under discussion) But, I prefer to apply a different rule-of-thumb: "incompetence is strongly equivalent to malice"

AmVess 6y ago

The last thing police need are more tools that don't work and they don't understand how to use. That they still use polygraphs should make everyone's hair stand on end.

tartoran 6y ago
As I understand polygraphs are used like placebos/intimidation tactic to get the suspects to spill the beans. As far as I know the polygraph isn't accepted as evidence in court unless all parties agree to it. However, the dirtiest thing is to use all kind useless evidence and intimidation techniques to scare otherwise innocent people into taking plea deals. This whole guilty plea saga is a disgrace to the justice system.
- jonny_eh 6y ago
  > As far as I know the polygraph isn't accepted as evidence in court unless all parties agree to it That's not the only place where they can be used, and cause damage.
- _underfl0w_ 6y ago
  Correct. It's widely considered inadmissible as evidence in court. They're also rarely used outside of the U.S. AFAIK. Recordings of interrogations that feature them also show that they tend to come along with other appeals to ethos ("this is doctor so-and-so...") and hand-wavey forms of intimidation like touting their "seriousness" or "efficacy". Anything that requires a person to "interpret" its output is likely not very deterministic, and so likely not very reliable for establishing... anything. This is akin to palm reading or graphology. Unfortunately, revealing to the police in such a situation exactly how foolish they look by getting behind such a device isn't exactly advisable either!
  - amiga 6y ago
    The Penn and Teller series, Bullshit, features an episode on polygraph machines and interviewer techniques. It's a good watch.
- KittenInABox 6y ago
  A failed polygraph while inadmissible in court will still be used by police during their own investigations to confirm or deny their "gut feeling".
  - AmVess 6y ago
    I failed a polygraph. There was a crime at a store, and my name came up when they searched through the ATM records. Police had ample evidence that I was in no way related to the crime, but kept trying to find something to pin on me because of the failed test. Those particular detectives had complete faith in the lie detector as a valid tool of police work. Video evidence of me entering the store, using the atm, and immediately leaving the store? That was not evidence to them because I failed the polygraph. I take an exceedingly dim view of any police department that uses a polygraph in any capacity. They've been proven time and time and time again to be worthless as a tool, but police still use them. The rough equivalent is using tarot cards as a tool for solving crimes.
    - CraneWorm 6y ago
      You assume they wanted truth when in reality they only want confession.
    - syshum 6y ago
      There are many things in law enforcement that have either been proven to be worthless, near worthless or never been proven to be valid... Eye Witness Testimony for example, aside from the fact the people are terrible at recall anyway and High Stress causes memory problems above and beyond the normal memory issues of the human mind, it is very very very easy to manipulate a victim either directly or indirectly to identify the "target" no necessarily the actual criminal police "drug" dogs are another one, it is more or less a blank check to probable cause for a search. Then there is one people never even question because it is the foundation of the legal system, the good old finger print... It always amazes me that with DNA it is always probabilistic, "1 in 4 billion people will have this same DNA" but with Finger Prints is an absolute, Match no match.. Call me crazy but I don't think that position is scientifically valid
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  > the dirtiest thing is to use all kind useless evidence and intimidation techniques to scare otherwise innocent people into taking plea deals They don't even need to do that. They can just lie to you. "Hey, your buddy just totally ratted you out in the other room, you better tell us your side of it if you don't want to take the rap for everything"
  - SerLava 6y ago
    Even worse, they can pretend they have evidence that they don't, pretend they believe the evidence, and pretend it's enough to convict you by itself. They can tell you to just say you were there, and they'll go easy on you. You lie and say you were there, now they have evidence that can actually lock you up, even if you are a random person off the street.
    - bluejekyll 6y ago
      To a degree, but I also think this will be changing over time as more and more innocent people are found to have been convicted on false statements used through coercive lying tactics by the police. For example, in this case police threatened to arrest the mans wife if he didn’t confess to killing his child (a new trial was ordered): https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2014/02/20/police-can-lie-to-suspects-during-interrogations-says-court-of-appeals/ https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2014/02/20/police-can-lie... But they went on to say it was still acceptable to lie to suspects... I imagine this murky area of the law will eventually say that police cannot lie to suspects. The Central Park Five is mentioned in that article and is a blatant example of police lying to coerce testimony and then putting innocent children in prison.
    - syshum 6y ago
      Even Worse than all of that, they can use all of those things, while threatening you with dozens of charges and decades of imprisonment then say "but if you act right now and sign this we will only give you a couple of years and then you will be free" in any other context these tactics themselves would be illegal, and i am firm believer that you can not enforce the law by breaking, and that the police should NEVER how the power to do things the public can not
pmiller2 6y ago
See also "touch DNA": https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191026/12493943266/federal-court-says-touch-dna-analysis-is-mostly-guesswork-that-cant-be-used-as-evidence.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191026/12493943266/feder...

gwern 6y ago

Are we looking at the same photos? They look uncannily alike to me, to the point where I'm left wondering if the forged license actually reuses a photo from Parks. (As a double convict in NJ, I suspect his earlier mugshots would not be hard for the forger to get. Certainly no harder than forging a license.)

crooked-v 6y ago
"Uncannily"? I don't see it. Different mouth proportions compared to the nose, different cheekbones, different eyebrow lengths...
sebastien_b 6y ago
They do look similar (enough to become a potential suspect, though I don't think should be enough for a warrant), and given that police departments don't "protect" their mugshots, I wouldn't be surprised if the picture was indeed reused (or photoshopped). But I really wonder if the same officers that dealt with the suspect also questioned the innocent victim in this case - it seems like this wouldn't be the case (and gross negligence on their part) - those people should've been able to tell them apart (instead of solely relying on the picture they got from the license). I think this is what the judge wanted instead of just the facial recognition "evidence" (which eventually led to the charges being dropped) - something like, oh I don't know, the fingerprints from the abandoned vehicle? Basic investigative work, perhaps?
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Eh, I wouldn't even say that. I'd say they look similar enough to be put into the same photo lineup, but I wouldn't even drag the guy from the article in to do a physical lineup, much less arrest him.
  - sebastien_b 6y ago
    Agree that a photo alone shouldn’t be enough for an arrest warrant. Like I said - either the officers that dealt with the suspect didn’t deal with/look at the victim, or else they’re blind (or trying to meet a quota).

cgriswald 6y ago

> All I know is that I'm highly skeptical that this white guy would suffer the same fate, even if I were to have a similar criminal record. It is not clear to me that a prosecutor's office which has demonstrated that it is not interested in justice, would have cared about the color of skin in the beginning. They're after low-hanging fruit and maybe establishing facial recognition as 'proof enough'. A poor, white ex-con who can't afford a lawyer might just take a plea deal. I think the point of possible divergence is when the guy lawyer-ed up.

truthwhisperer 6y ago

Maybe most type of criminal activity in that category is done by black persons and they are harder to distinguish due to dark patterns ...

Scoundreller 6y ago

> it mostly false positives only for dark-skinned people. Dunno what the technical reason is, but if there was one, I bet it went something like this: v1: sales 'engineer' says: "Our FR product works great on light skin but terribly on darker skin so we've largely disabled that" and made zero sales. On v2 (version2 or vendor2), they just dialed up the acceptable false positive rate, said "ya, it works on everyone, no problem!" and sold sold sold!

pmiller2 6y ago
Part of the reason is likely that black people, particularly dark skinned black people, are just harder to photograph than people of other ethnicities: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/04/16/303721251/light-and-dark-the-racial-biases-that-remain-in-photography https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/04/16/303721251... Edit: I'm placing this higher up in the thread for more visibility, but, for those interested, here are some tips for photographing people with darker skin tones: https://creativecloud.adobe.com/discover/article/10-tips-for-photographing-darker-skin-tones https://creativecloud.adobe.com/discover/article/10-tips-for...
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  That's fine, but the system shouldn't be dialed up to accept more false positive matches, but it sounds like it is being so.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    Oh, I agree 100%. I'm just saying that maybe the quality of input to the algorithms leaves something to be desired. Or, maybe the fact that there are relatively few black people in tech means that the developers of these algorithms don't even notice that there's a bias to correct for, whether it's in the input or not.
- dstick 6y ago
  Oh come on! “They” are harder to photograph? This is exactly the same like saying black people are less intelligent because they don’t hold the higher paid jobs. It’s not by choice. Nor is there any physical reason why that should be. The technology to photograph is biased to better capture white skinned people. It even says so in the very article you link to: “A lot of [the design of film and motion technology] was conceived with the idea of the best representation of white people.” Improve the technology!

treeman79 6y ago

If you want variety, iPhone had some trouble with Chinese. https://nypost.com/2017/12/21/chinese-users-claim-iphone-x-face-recognition-cant-tell-them-apart/ https://nypost.com/2017/12/21/chinese-users-claim-iphone-x-f...

pmiller2 6y ago
Ugh. You would think Apple would do more testing in one of their largest markets, and the place where iPhones are literally built.

throwaway2245 6y ago

> I'm not quite ready to allow my cynicism to let me think it is an intentional feature Hanlon's razor is hinted at in the later discussion, i.e. "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence" (at least, both the words incompetence and malice appear under discussion) But, I prefer to apply a different rule-of-thumb: "incompetence is strongly equivalent to malice"