Technology

I bet if they made all footage publicly available, watchdog style groups would be reviewing the shit out of that footage. But yeah AI might help too maybe.

Exactly, and this also contradicts the "few bad apples" defense. If there were only a few bad apples, then the police unions should be bending over backwards to eradicate them sooner than later to protect the many good apples, not to mention improve the long suffering reputation of police.

Instead, they're doing the exact opposite, making it clear to anyone paying attention that it's mostly, if not entirely, bad apples.

The whole police thing and public accountability kinda makes sense, but I don't think this means we should be pushing on AI just because the "bad guys" don't like it.

AI is full of holes and unknowns. And relying on it to do stuff like this is a dangerous precedent IMO. You absolutely need someone reviewing it, yes. But they're also not going to catch everything and starting with this will mean it will start being leaned on and it will replace thorough reviews by people.

I think something low stakes and unobtainable without the tools might make sense - like AIs reading through game chat or Twitter posts to identify issues where it's impossible to have someone reading everything, and if some get by, oh well it's a post on the internet.

But with police behavior? Those are people with the authority to ruin people's lives or kill them. I do NOT trust AI to catch every problematic behavior and this stuff ABSOLUTELY should be done by people. I'd be okay with it as an aid, in theory, but once it's doing any "aiding" it's also approving some behavior. It can't really be telling anyone where TO look without implying where NOT to look, and that gives it some authority, even as an "aid". If it's not making decisions, it's not saving anyone any time.

Idk, I'm all for the public accountability and stuff like that here, but having AI make decisions around the behavior of people with so much fucking power is horrifying to me.

Yep.

Ya 'all like surveillance so much, let's put all government employees under a camera all the time. Of all the places I find cameras offensive, that one not so much.

"A police state keeps everyone safe"

...

"No wait, not like that"

These algorithms already have a comical bias towards the folks contracting their use.

Case in point, the UK Home Office recently contracted with an AI firm to rapidly parse through large backlogs of digital information.

The Guardian has uncovered evidence that some of the tools being used have the potential to produce discriminatory results, such as:

An algorithm used by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) which an MP believes mistakenly led to dozens of people having their benefits removed.

A facial recognition tool used by the Metropolitan police has been found to make more mistakes recognising black faces than white ones under certain settings.

An algorithm used by the Home Office to flag up sham marriages which has been disproportionately selecting people of certain nationalities.

Monopoly was a lie. You're never going to get that Bank Error In Your Favor. It doesn't happen. The House (or, the Home Office, in this case) always wins when these digital tools are employed, because the money for the tool is predicated on these agencies clipping benefits and extorting additional fines from the public at-large.

AI can't be the last word in what gets marked for misconduct etc., however using it as a screening tool for potentially problematic moments in a law enforcement officer's encounters would be useful. It's an enormous task to screen through those hours upon hours of video and probably prohibitively expensive for humans to work through.

Maybe if it's just being used to flag potential areas of interest for review by a human? I'm open to the idea as long as there's definite accountability and care.

Which, returning to the real world, we know is a fat chance.

It's just flagging for human review. The dataset is too large and it can be made more objective than human review. As soon as I hear anything upsets police unions, I know it's gotta be good. Support this.

One thing AI is generally pretty good at is identifying what is in a video. So at the very least you don't have to waste money paying someone to watch 100s of hours of videos of donuts.

Is this the kind of thing anyone could be happy about?

Cops reviewing themselves, we know how that works out.

1. Cops being reviewed by shitty AI.
2. ???
3. ???
4. wtf

I had a shower fantasy the other day where I wrote an AI that hacked all of the data brokers and web trackers then doxxed every politician and political candidate's web history in it's totality the instant they were added to the ballot, worldwide. It was decentralized running many instances and used a similar structure for distributing the information.

The people most likely to be abused by police are the least likely to be able or willing to file a formal complaint.

I'm just theorising how AI could be used, but consider the situation where someone makes a complaint, but doesn't remember the exact time of the incident (say they remember it was within a six hour time frame for this example), or what the officer looked like.

You have (for example) 20 officers on duty it could be potentially be, in a six hour time frame, that's 120 hours or 5 days of footage. An AI can use facial recognition to find the complainant within minutes.