London's Met Police: We won't use facial recognition at Notting Hill Carnival London cops will not use controversial and inaccurate facial recognition technology at this year's Notting Hill Carnival – in a departure from the trend over the previous two years. The Metropolitan Police have been using the technology since the 2016 carnival, which takes place on the August bank holiday weekend, despite …
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So let me guess, facial recognition is going to be deployed at all the tube stations / overground stations that give access to the route of the Notting Hill Carnival, or the stations from which people travel from?
It's still the "Notting Hill v Chelsea Flower Show" question of where to deploy and the MET has 'chosen' Notting Hill every single time for this trial.
A face is a face, if this is a trial. If the MET wants to use intrusive tech, it has to be trialled in all areas, to make all sections of society know how uncomfortable it can feel.
This is supposed to be an event that brings people together, not single them out for vetting 'by association'.
CFS attendees may
- Call the Met commish on his private number and object
- stand up and object in parliament / TV studios
- ask loudly why the officers aren't catching crims somewhere else
- Call their lawyer to get the footage from the private (ticketed) function erased
etc.
NHC attendees
- are generally too busy enjoying themselves
So the NHC is easiest option.
In your face cameras are just to gauge the public reaction as they eventually want to run the software in real time over any available coverage for anything.
Any perceived stereotyping of CFS attendees is unintentional :)
On the assumption that the "facial recognition technology" is just Constable Savage looking at a monitor
And Police Constable Pan Am* on the NHC monitors....
* Possibly obscure Monty Python reference.
There is no need to deploy the technology as 99%+ of the attendees will conveniently bring their phones with them, and their phones will happily connect and hence identify themselves to local pico cells.
"to make all sections of society know how uncomfortable it can feel."
Either: "You mean it reaches out and touches your face to identify, like my old deaf and blind Gram-ma-ma?"
Or: "I don't have a criminal history, so there's nothing to feel."
The "98% false positive rate" is a red herring, unless we also know what the false negative rate was (which we don't, and neither do the cops).
If you surveille a million people, your system flags 50 of them, then on closer inspection 49 of them weren't who you thought - that's a 98% false positive rate, but it's still a hell of a lot better than trying to check a million faces manually (which would be a 99.9999% false positive rate).
Without knowing how many "persons of interest" were in the initial sample - which, pretty much by definition, they can't know - we still don't know yet how good the tool is.
"SLR. 7.62mm"
I got handed one of those too. Great toy. I used to shoot alongside the 42 Commandos and the Devon police. Unlike the 42nd's the police were crap shots.
The SLR was even more fun with a Heckler & Koch .22 convertor. Then you could blast away without fear of the bullets going through a brick wall, and you didn't feel so bruised after firing a few thousand rounds.
Just like your assumption that Stab Fest 2018 will be committed by black people.
Maybe it will, maybe it won't, but I think given this years stats for London, we can say most of those stabbed will probably be young black men. Having lived in London for about 20 years, I can't remember a single year when most of the carnivals stabbing victims weren't young black men.
The carnival causes a spike in stabbings and rapes every time it is held. Any other event triggering as much violent crime and disorder would have long ago been banned. It does raise the question of why this event is allowed to persist when others would not be.
It also fails to give the public sufficient notice about the deployment of an intrusive technology, which in some cases might dissuade them from attending the event – particularly if it is to be used at a protest.
Berry said that it was important that, whatever happened with the trial, the police continued to give notice to the public – so they could decide whether to attend – and urged more, not less, transparency in the face of public pressure.
Use of facial recognition should not dissuade people from attending - that would give the Police the power to quell peaceful protest before it even takes place.
People should still attend... wearing Theresa May masks. Ten thousand Theresa Mays marching through London. Do something with that (though given their 98% false positive rate, I suppose the risk is that they might actually identify some of the protestors underneath their masks!).
Hmm.
The idea (presumably) is to identify the small minority of football holigan/anarchist types who were banned from their events of choice and who enjoy starting a riot by tossing bricks or molotov cocktails over the heads of peaceful protesters, and using the peaceful protesters as unwilling and unwitting human shields against the police response.
If the police are simply checking against those people and then doing a stop and search on them to see if they are carring... shall we say contraband? then personally I think that's fine. I think that most of the peaceful protesters who intend on attending a peaceful protest would agree with this too, since nobody really enjoys having molotov cocktails tossed over their heads and it's in everybody's interests to keep peaceful protests peaceful.
However, if the police are doing it with the intent of keeping lists for a long period of "Citizen 123456 attended a protest about $cause" then I think we can agree that's a serious problem that ought to be dealt with.
I think the police will say, quite sincerely, that their only thought is for public safety and they have no intention of keeping files on innocent, law-abiding protesters.
I also think that no amount of innocent intentions will, in fact, prevent said files from being kept anyway. It's just too easy to come up with reasons to hold on to data, once gathered.
There's more genetic diversity in Africa than in the whole rest of the world. Humans originated in Africa and everyone else is just overspill.
Computer recognition, however, is not good at recognising black people... as people.
Ironically this is a "black box" problem.
That's an interesting point.
What's to stop Google / Facebook setting up commercial private camera operations?, which capture faces at events like Glastonbury, Notting Hill, that cross-reference (using facial recognition) those captured images to Google / Facebook profiles photos, and then 'conduit' that data, package it, and sell it to advertisers (or Government).
A sort of "street view" on specific days, to see which of its users attend certain live events.
If you're carrying an Android mobile, running the Facebook app / Google and have location services on, I suppose you're already giving them this information, but it could be also used as a secondary validation of Facebook accounts to user profile images.
Is it not?
Hence the lack of any "Legislative framework" for Automatic Number Plate Recognition (and storage)
Of course if all you need is "Machinchine pings, they's a wron'un" device then job done.
Like the KGB (and its successors) always said "We may not know what you did this time, but we're sure you've done something sometime, so this is just us catching you."
Mine will be the one with the old, well thumbed copy of the Gulag Archipelago..
"Wouldn't it be easier if everything that's not specifically allowed is forbidden?"
That's the UK that is.....
At least for ingesting any substance. If it's not on the list, then it's banned.
Considering how facial recognition software often can't even *see* black faces, let alone identify them, it sounds like the perfect training ground, false positives be damned.
It's acting on that information in any way other than a friendly "Hi, we're testing this software and it thinks you are Mr Person - would you be willing to show us ID to prove one way or the other?" that's problematic.
If I was the Chief Constable of the Met and It was established that one of my departments was funding a system with a 98% failure rate I would be asking questions about how it got approved.
That's equivalent to buying myself a nice shiny new car for the daily commute and then discovering it only worked on some random seven days in the year. I think I would be back at the dealer's very quickly looking for a full refund.
Chris Cosgrove
98% failure rate ?
If I was the Chief Constable of the Met and It was established that one of my departments was funding a system with a 98% failure rate I would be asking questions about how it got approved.
I guess that depends on whether the Met have actually paid for the system, or whether the occasions when "the Police" are deploying it is actually a partnership where they're offering the vendor the opportunity to do live-demos and prove/refine the system before any significant investment is made.
I don't suppose the very first TETRA demonstrators worked especially well either (it's successor is certainly taking a while to iron out the bugs).
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