7 ms·
Police officer investigated for using AI to 'create evidence' in multiple cases
- appleslicemusic 4mo ago[flagged]
- WarOnPrivacy 4mo agoper ft.com: https://archive.fo/BIOej https://archive.fo/BIOej [The Derbyshire Police] declined to give more detail about what the evidential material consisted of. The term [evidential material] can be used to describe witness statements.
- wahern 4mo agoI don't know if it's still the case in the UK, but in the common law and still in the US this why all substantive evidence, with very rare exception (e.g. dying statements), is witness testimony given on the stand. It may seem absurd when a witness or expert is given a transcript of an earlier statement or report just to recite it, but this is exactly why. The loophole is all the powers the police and government have to more-or-less punish someone before a trial, or even before charges.
- bobthepanda 4mo agoi do wonder, that in the age where we have image and video creation out of the bag, whether or not this will result in whole classes of evidence becoming completely unreliable.
- thewebguyd 4mo agoI suspect so. Tbh, I'm surprised it hasn't happened already with the amount of processing that cell phones do on photos, with generative fill/expand/perspective change, etc. We are quickly going to reach a point where any photo or video taken on a smartphone is inadmissible by default.
- pjc50 4mo agoThere's a big gap between "theoretically unreliable" and courts actually recognizing that, unfortunately. Lots of forensics is much more dubious than CSI would have you believe.
- thatguy0900 4mo agoMy girlfriends been having me watch law and order svu with her and to be honest it doesn't really even seem trustworthy with how they want to present it. The psychologist guy especially will come up with some wildly detailed assertions about who the criminal is based on nothing
- assimpleaspossi 4mo agoAre we really going to go to a fictional TV show now?
- CDRdude 4mo agoIf a fictional-but-popular TV show treats some kinds of evidence as more reliable than they really are, juries may be primed to believe in the kind of thing the TV show presents as legitimate.
- kalleboo 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect
- altmanaltman 4mo agoSure but lawyers would know that and ensure evidence doesn't get presented that way right? There are also a lot of other biases that lawyers have to navigate through. Humans are flawed but that doesn't mean everyone in the jury thinks TV is real.
- cwillu 4mo ago“Lots of forensics is much more dubious than CSI would have you believe.” was what was being replied to.
- yardstick 4mo agoThere used to be - probably still are - cameras that would digitally sign all their images. Used in crime scenes? Maybe we will end up seeing wider adoption of this, despite the privacy implications. Hackers attention then will focus (once again) on the certificate supply chain and crypto hardware.
- aorloff 4mo agoI imagine in this age of blockchains you could embed into a media file a signature that proved it was no older than the timestamp of when it occurred, the digital equivalent of a hostage-proof-of-life photo with a recent newspaper But I don't know of a cryptographic mechanism to ensure that a digital image is not more recent than a particular time
- catlikesshrimp 4mo agoInteresting, There aren't any newspapers left in my country, neither printed nor not printed. The closest you can find is the weekly advertising booklet here and there. Which is irrelevant now because a computer can either stich new content to an old picture, or entirely producing a custom picture. That would be a use case for a block chain. But I still don't understand how you are securing the integrity of the validity of the certificate stating the authenticity of the media. I only understand you are stamping media with a "at least as old as [timestamp]
- 3eb7988a1663 4mo agoIf you want to prove that "happened at or after this timestamp" you can use a randomness beacon. NIST[0] and others publish a random number every N minutes. Embed that (or a combination) of those seeds to prove that you observed this value. This does not work for the harder problem of proving an event happened before a timestamp. [0] https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/interoperable-randomness-beacons https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/interoperable-randomness-beac...
- aorloff 4mo ago
- asdff 4mo agoYou should see what people were capable of in the darkroom, let alone before all this. You could always manipulate imagery ever since there was imagery to manipulate.
- olyjohn 4mo agoBig difference between that and writing an AI prompt.
- asdff 4mo agoNot really. End result is the same: manipulated image.
- pyth0 4mo agoAre we really pretending like the effort to do something doesn't affect how often that thing occurs?
- asdff 4mo agoAre we acting like that was ever a limiting factor towards disseminating propaganda in the analog age?
- pyth0 4mo agoNo obviously not. But this is silly framing because there are so many things we do because it increases the effort for bad actors to do bad things. We close and lock our doors not because it prevents break-ins, but because that is a barrier that makes breaking in more inconvenient.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- asdff 4mo agoWe close and lock our doors to keep people undergoing psychosis out. Burglars are not stopped by locks.
- testing22321 4mo agoI’m still shocked we have not seen an extremely convincing AI video of a famous person or world leader announcing something huge like UBI or WW3 or aliens. Surely it’s just a matter of time.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- pjc50 4mo agoOh, I assumed they were already out there in the sea of slop like the Iran Lego propaganda tiktoks.
- defrost 4mo agoThey're out there, recommending scam investments / crypto coins more often than major world events. Meta, for one, is keen to bury such things and avoid responsibility for ad contents: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-17/andrew-forrest-battles-meta-over-fake-ads/106574806 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-17/andrew-forrest-battle...
- Lammy 4mo agoThe end-game is that people will willingly surveil themselves 24/7 on behalf of The System because that will be the only way to prove what they didn't do.
- LtWorf 4mo agoAh yes training the AI with more data to represent me even more accurately.
- happymellon 4mo agoSome people still believe in polygraphs.
- tim333 4mo agoIt'll no doubt shift the probabilities but people have always lied and faked data. With video coming out of Ukraine there are a lot of fake things but beyond AI glitches you can check who the source is, if it correlates with known events and so on.
- radicaldreamer 4mo agoI wonder how many people have been unjustly imprisoned between planted evidence, made up evidence, and illegal parallel construction…
- madaxe_again 4mo agoOver all time? Probably tens of millions.
- gcr 4mo agoHere in the US? Probably a large double-digit percentage of cases imo…
- Terr_ 4mo agoEspecially if law enforcement uses Parallel Construction [0], lying to the court about the process taken. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
- MagicMoonlight 4mo ago[dead]
- cadamsdotcom 4mo ago> large double-digit percentage This is a very very intense claim, and if true, would represent a monumental institutional failure across hundreds or even thousands of disparate organizations. Do you have any data to support your hunch? Strong claims require strong evidence.
- lokar 4mo agoI don’t know the numbers, but DNA exonerations give a bit of a natural experiment (where testable evidence was preserved).
- 4mo ago
- tim-tday 4mo agoMaybe use the word “falsify”?
- tamimio 4mo agoCan we know the motivation? Will it get them a bonus at the end of the year? Was it something common in the cases, maybe similar victims or something else?
- delichon 4mo agoI'd wager that it was just a shortcut to getting his work done. That banal motive is why we've seen an explosion of these cases and why they won't stop.
- sieabahlpark 4mo ago[dead]
- constableclaude 4mo agoThe headline evokes ideas of creating a video of a suspect perpetrating the crime but what I think is much more likely is the police officer used AI to enhance an image in a way that they considered innocuous, e.g: a photo was blurry so they “enhanced” it. Since “enhancing” is letting AI fill in the gaps it would be using AI to “create evidence”. Regardless of what they did, tampering with evidence is completely unacceptable and should result in their dismissal and conviction but I don’t think the story will transpire to be as attention grabbing. A well meaning idiot could convince themselves that enhancing evidence is somehow justifiable whereas it would be almost impossible for even the most corrupt moron to justify creating evidence out of thin air. Creating evidence out of thin air would be ridiculous because evidence is available to the defence who would be able to immediately identify if an image or video had been created (as the defendant would be able to recognize what they do or did not do) whereas “enhancing” an image could be easily spotted by other officers. “How come this photo is clearer than the last time I saw it?” “Oh I ran it through ChatGPT to clean it up! Neat, eh? Just like on CSI!”
- Chinjut 4mo agoYes, let's please give police officers the copious (cop-ious?) benefit of the doubt they have earnt.
- daveshistory 4mo agoHonestly, I didn't tell it to add that gun to the picture, it did that on its own!
- Quarrelsome 4mo agoyou're quite right, every single one of them is actively trying to kill each and every one of us. To consider any other possibility would be hysterical.
- hiddencost 4mo ago... Police in the united states have more than a century of flagrant misconduct under their belts. They protect their own, they almost never face consequences for killing people, they are frequently corrupt, they are frequently biased. Here's a couple fun examples: https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2026-06-05/boston-law-enforcement-experts-call-vulgar-texts-revealed-in-karen-read-lawsuit-appalling https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2026-06-05/boston-law-enforc... https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/la-is-investigating-50-year-old-police-gangs-finally-2022-03-30/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/la-is-investigating...
- sudonem 4mo agoI would be interested in knowing both what kind of fabrication occurred, but perhaps I’m not curious about how it was discovered? Did the defense use some sort of tool to debunk? Was it just an obvious deepfake etc? Or was it the officer’s ineptitude that got him caught?
- otherme123 4mo agoMy experiece with whatsapp family groups is that a lot of people over 40 can't detect the most obvious AI fakes (e.g. Studio Gibli clones, or three handed people), so they share the most stupid stuff as it was real, while youngers seem have an instinct to detect AI but can't tell exactly why they know. I can picture a cop fabricating images that are obvious, even with a watermark included, while totally convinced that it is undetectable.
- warumdarum 4mo agoThe ai slop uses movie compositions in whats supossed to be handheld shots?
- thih9 4mo agoI like using professional cameras and lighting for casual photos, I guess everyone now assumes it’s AI. Which makes sense but still, ffs.
- threecheese 4mo agoIME it’s more like 60, which then makes more sense given vision deterioration. Then again most of my over-40 experience is with folks in the tech industry.
- amelius 4mo agoProbably simply a case of "show me a picture of X with their fingers in the cookie jar".
- TurdF3rguson 4mo ago[flagged]
- newaccountman2 4mo agopolice gonna police
- dofm 4mo agoI saw this headline, saw that it was Sky news, thought "oh a British policeman? Bet it was Derbyshire police". There you go.
- danielvaughn 4mo agoAs an American, I'm totally out of the loop on this one but it sounds interesting. I assume Derbyshire has a reputation?
- dofm 4mo agoThey are just rather over-eager and a bit of a law unto themselves in a rather silly way; it is Derbyshire police that hassled people walking in the open air during COVID, including rather excitably harrassing Peak District walkers with drones, and enforced rules that were only guidance as if they were law (famously asserting that two women walking in the fresh air with a coffee was "a picnic"). Them being all super-keen to use AI really fits. Some pillock of an officer going too far really fits. Derbyshire is really safe but they act like it is not.
- sveme 4mo agoWhy police (and media) cameras aren‘t forced to use camera hardware signing, aka content credentials, is beyond me.
- Iolaum 4mo agoit's a feature, not a bug
- AnthonyMouse 4mo agoIt's because they're a scam. Point the camera at a forged image with a higher resolution than the camera sensor and it will make a signed copy of the unsigned forgery. That's before getting into the practical problems with securing the keys. Every camera by every manufacturer has keys in it and the attacker only needs one key from one camera, and they get to choose the model? Creating something premised on needing to trust something with such a high probability of being compromised is worse than nothing, because it allows the ensuing forgeries a mechanism to pass themselves off as "signed" "real" images.
- gorgoiler 4mo agoBut what about if: …the signature included the depth measured by the autofocus system across the image? …or a tiny stereo image was included to capture depth? …or a mini video in the ten seconds before and after the photo was taken? …and the key is in a tamper proof HSM? …and the key is deleted the moment the camera detects the case being taken apart? I know that it is a losing battle to try to build such hardware when offline attackers have essentially infinite time to dismantle even the most elaborate systems — no such thing as an un breakable safe, only how long it takes to break into it, etc — but I feel these are valid counter measures, are they not?
- totetsu 4mo agoBut also what about .. Even now there is a range of forensic tech that can be used to statistically indicate if an image has been doctored, or generated, wouldnt't adding more and more real world data to the capture increase the bar for doctoring, so that only attackers with infinite resources can do it? At least it would stop Bobby Rotten from doing it.
- brador 4mo agoThis is probably using AI to remove a background or object from an image, not a 6 finger perp.
- warumdarum 4mo agoSuch a case should trigger a auto revision on all cases said officer ever touched.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4mo agoYou'd also think that police blatantly lying (with or without AI) in official documents and/or in court under oath would trigger immediate firing and a ban of them ever serving in law enforcement in any capacity ever again. But no.
- roryirvine 4mo agoIf charged, it would likely be as either forgery, perverting the course of justice, or perjury (or perhaps some combination of those) depending on the specifics. If found guilty at trial, they'd be looking at a prison sentence as the abuse of position aspect would automatically mean high culpability. Expected starting point would be 4 years if an innocent person has been charged or convicted on the basis of the false evidence (which is implied by the report). Perhaps 6-7 years if multiple people have been. Very unlikely they'd ever be able to work in policing or related fields again.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4mo agoExcept none of that ever happens. When caught lying police just say it was an oopsie and pinky promise to do better next time. Prosecutors and judges do not charge police for these incidents, so they keep happening.
- jrsbailbond 4mo ago[flagged]
- jibal 4mo agoLong a police practice (it happened to me) that AI makes easier.