After 9 months, the New Orleans Police Department’s use of facial recognition has resulted in zero arrests and multiple false positives

Zero arrests as well.

New Orleans is pretty black, but thats just impressive.

More recently, there was also Google Photos mistaking a photo of a black couple as "gorillas", back in 2015.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33347866

On a funnier note, there was also the AI tool turning a pixelated photo of Barack Obama into that of a white man.

https://www.theverge.com/21298762/face-depixelizer-ai-machine-learning-tool-pulse-stylegan-obama-bias

Thank you for your service!

Yeah, but statistics is a b*tch.

We had a similar technology for a test run some years ago at a train station in Berlin, capital of Germany and largest city in the EU with 3.8M.

The results the government happily touted as a success were devastating. They had a true positive rate of 80% (and this was already cooked since they tested several systems at several locations but only reported the best results), which is really not that good to start with.

But they were also extremely proud of the false negative positive rate, which was below 0.1%. That doesn’t sound too bad, does it?

Well, let’s see…

True positive means you actually identified the people you were looking for. Now, I don’t know the number of people Berlin’s police is actively looking for, but it’s not that much. And the chances of one of them actually passing that very station are even worse. And out of that, you have 20% undetected. That’s one out of five. Great. If I were a terrorist, I would happily take that chance.

So now let’s have a look at the false negative positive rate, which means you incorrectly identified a totally harmless person as a terrorist/infected/whatever. The population for that condition is: everyone passing through that station.

Let’s assume there’s a 100k people on any given day (which IIRC is roughly half of what that station in Berlin actually has). 0.1% of 100k is 100 people, every day, who are mistakenly reported as „terrorists“. Yay.

How about 15/15?

It's totally accurate though. It's like the definition of systemic racism really. Think about housing or financial policy that disproportionately fails for minorities. They aren't some Klan manifesto. Instead they just include banal qualifications and exemptions that end up at the same result.

This seems shortsighted. You are basically asking people to police their own biases. That's a tall ask for something no one can claim immunity from.

Ask the people who create the data sets that machine learning models train on how they feel about racism and get back to us

It can be an imported bias/descrimination. I still think that words fair.

Do you have a more accurate word?

You need to learn some critical race theory. Racist systems turn innocent intentions into racist actions. If a PhD student trains an AI model on only white people because the university only has white students, then that AI model is going to fail black people because black people were already failed by university admissions. Innocent intention plus racist system equals racist action.

When they are trained with incentives for finding something, instead of incentives to be correct, then they will find something. Same is true for man or beast.

Oh they are progressive. They'll support Black Lives Matter and sympathise with Iranian women.

But there's only so much anybody can do when it's the entire US (and further afield) social structure at fault. It's the same where I am. I work on a project with 3 other white guys. If I put a job advert up for another programmer, who will apply? 3-4 more white guys.

I agree that it's a lack of good testing. Especially when you consider that it'll be mostly used to pick black guys out of a database. And especially so in New Orleans.

They're more libertarian than liberal. Anti worker rights, anti consumer rights, and anti taxation.

The only government spending they're in favour of is government spending and subsidies on tech e.g. Tesla, space X, and the entire military complex.

Also AI is taught by its creator. Tech has some of it’s most well hidden, bigotted, mid-level white people refusing to critically question their own bias and privilege. There’s a shit tone of that fragile masculinity in the tech industry just hard coding it into it.

There was a guy fired from google for writing a manifesto about how women aren’t ‘wired’ for tech. And that’s just the one that waved his crazy flag out in the open so no one in upper management could easily keep on ignoring it.

NOPD's stated goal is 1600, a ratio of 1:227 persons.

The actual ratio is 1:385

Cleveland, similar in size to New Orleans, has a ratio 1:310. They also state that they are suffering from a serious police shortage.

By comparison:

NYC has a ratio of 1:166

Chicago 1:180

Should be closer to 1 to 100. A large part of is overhead, desk clerks, admin, logistics guys, people like that. They all count as cops. And remember, they're only working ine shift a day, most of the time they're not working. And they usually end up in court for every ticket and arrest.

So yeah, they're understaffed.

0 officers

Yeah, it goes along with the low standards that define probable cause. Policing, just like a lot of professions, is subject to bean counting when bean counting is not appropriate. Voters love to see statistics that flaunt "more arrests." Funny how people love numbers without really understanding what the numbers mean.