Without even looking at the AI part, I have a single question: Did anybody investigate? That's it.
Whether it's AI that flagged her, or a witness who saw her, or her IP address appeared on the logs. Did anybody bothered to ask her "where were you the morning of july 10th between 3 and 4pm. But that's not what happened, they saw the data and said "we got her".
But this is the worst part of the story:
> And after her ordeal, she never plans to return to the state: “I’m just glad it’s over,” she told WDAY. “I’ll never go back to North Dakota.”
That's the lesson? Never go back to North Dakota. No, challenge the entire system. A few years back it was a kid accused of shoplifting [0]. Then a man dragged while his family was crying [1]. Unless we fight back, we are all guilty until cleared.
The thing about the legal system is there's no incentive to investigate to find the truth.
The incentive is to prosecte and prove the charges.
Speaking from the experience of being falsely accused after calling 911 to stop a drunk woman from driving.
The narrative they "investigated" was so obviously false, bodycam evidence directly contradicted multiple key facts. Officials are interested only seeking to prove the case. Thankfully the jury came to the right verdict.
There’s a judge down in Texas, Dallas area I believe, who is in social media a lot because he will excoriate prosecutors who bring bs in to his court room. He’s not soft on crime but hard on rights and process. If a defendant did the wrong thing, he will have the appropriate amount of sympathy, down to zero. At times he will tell them, we all know you got lucky here, do better. But he won’t let prosecutors slate by on garbage charges or statements or investigations by police. Which leads to my primary point at least for this discussion in particular:
To me the scariest part of this as a process is how many times (I’d casually estimate at least 75%) it is blindingly obvious that the prosecutor has not read the statement of charges or officer statements until everyone is in front of the judge. I get on one hand this judge seems to often be handling probable cause hearings but so many of these should never have resulted in any paperwork being turned in to the prosecution, let alone anyone having to show up in court.
Scary process is an understatement, especially because I was facing a domestic violence charge.
Long story short, emotional abusive partner got drunk and verbally combative, despite my attempts to de-escalate. When nothing worked I went into my bedroom and locked the door. She started pounding on the door and demanded her things. I gave them to her and told her she needs a ride home she no longer welcome. She verbally abused and provoked me for 10 minutes before getting in her car. Took the keys, called 911. She grabbed me causing us both to fall a few minutes before the cops arrived and told them I threw her to the ground. We both had a couple scapes so they arrested us both.
Interfered with the 911 call, filed a false police report, assaulted me, caused property damage. She got charged with class c assault only and a dismissal. I felt like I was seen as guilty until proven innocent.
Fortunately I recorded all her verbal abuse (prosecution tried to use it against me and brought in DV expert to explain both her conduct and my 911 call as typical in IPV cases)
Fortunately the jury didn't buy it. I was literally being threatened with violence in my own home for telling her to leave. Between that and the bodycam statements contradicting her testimony I was shocked that they didn't drop the charges or offer a favorable plea deal.
The judge was absolutely fair, prosecutor bent on punishment, alleged victim was attempting to ruin my life (as captured in my audio)
Whew!
In the end the claims were so obviously fabricated that my attorney made no defense. It was clear that the accuser was not credible.
Perjury was provable. No consequences for her. This happened in Brazoria county
I agree with this sentiment but when you start punishing this sort of thing you create more incentive to cover it up. It's a tricky problem and I'm not sure there's a perfect solution.
What we really need is a change in police culture.
Then the system should be redesigned such that transparency is a priority and cover ups are not feasible. And when cover ups eventually get found out, the punishments even more severe.
If the punishment fails to correct the behaviour, it is insufficient punishment or the wrong punishment. In this case, I'd say that individual punishments are the wrong tool to correct systemic behaviour. It should be career-ending for brass and prosecutors to be effective.
until then, there's a simple rule which works well: never talk to a cop. Or at least say the minimum number of words possible, give them nothing to use against you. Present ID if they ask for it, but never admit anything. If they persist, "lawyer". That has worked for me.
Medicine has a culture that adapts to this quite well. If you make an honest mistake and communicate it, you are often persecuted by your peers but not hung out to dry legally by your hospital and generally your actions are always defensible.
Similar practices are used in law enforcement, but the legal implications are seemingly more severe
Great idea, Except that this will never happen because public sector unions are important voting blocks. Public sector unions should be abolished (don’t have a problem with unions) but the conflict of interest is just too great.
Great point. Obviously can't expect them to vote against their own interests, because higher standards, higher accountability, and higher transparency will always be against those interests.
They mean that penalties and restitutions for wrongful prosecutions and wrongful convictions should not come from taxpayer money but private insurance. Right now, police departments feel zero pain from judgements against them so they have no reason to structurally correct their behaviour.
> The thing about the legal system is there's no incentive to investigate to find the truth.
The truth is much more complicated and involves politics. For example Seattle (and possibly other cities?) enacted a law that involves paying damages for being wrong in the event of bringing certain types of charges. But that has resulted in some widely publicized examples where the prosecutor erred by being overly cautious.
And then you have Florida who will bill you about $100 a day for finding yourself in a Florida jail, regardless of whether charges were dismissed, you were found not guilty or any such thing.
And to nobody’s surprise, failure to pay this bill is in itself a Class B felony…
That sounds like a recipe for domestic terrorism - the systemic disenfranchisement of people who have done nothing wrong for no apparent reason other than sheer greed. How long has this been in effect there?
I'm confused. Are you suggesting such a ridiculous system is letting class B felonies slide here? That would certainly be the pragmatic approach to being evil but in that case simply treating it as regular debt and going through civil channels would be more than sufficient.
Are you letting stuff in your backlog that you'll never get to before the product is gone or irrelevant "slide"?
Sure they could round those people up pretty easily just by following up on any contact with the system that they have, but why, for what, to cost the state more money that will likely never be repaid? Especially when sticking a body on DUI detail is hugely in the black. They'll just let that debt, it's accruing interests and the threat of further incarceration linger on the books indefinitely. If the person ever gets their life together they'll have to pay it or face incarceration.
I'm sure someone somewhere has written a DB query to select from outstanding balance where <exists in some other DB that is a proxy for people who have money to pay> and prioritize those cases.
Are you suggesting that Florida it’s to go ‘soft on “crime”’? That would fly in the face of almost all available evidence.
I have extended family in Florida. The system absolutely can and does and will push the issue. There’s a reason that it’s a crime not to pay for your incarceration even if you have a finding of factual innocence against you.
Your family isn't sleeping under a bridge or whatever. Of course the system wants your money or the money of people on comparable economic footing you associate with. If you can work as a debt slave to the system it wants you to do that even if it means a never ending cycle of robbing peter to pay paul, sleeping on other people's couches, etc. The man sleeping under a bridge cannot, so the cops and the DA and everyone else just go fry bigger fish. Maybe they push the issue 1/100th of the time and incarcerate someone every now and they but they absolutely do not prioritize it the way they do someone who could pay even if only by moving heaven and earth. The system doesn't want to manufacture yet another felony and then incarcerate someone for it out of thin air, that just costs the system more money.
Source: my tiny keyhole view into the system.
The parties involve always have have discretion to downgrade stuff to something else, or not pursue it at all and are incentivizes.
> The system doesn't want to manufacture yet another felony and then incarcerate someone for it out of thin air, that just costs the system more money.
You say this like Florida doesn't have both the most private prisons in the country, and the most inmates held in such facilities.
"The system" doesn't care. Florida has, repeatedly, shown a willingness to cut back on education and healthcare.
And private prisons have repeatedly been shown to be a hotbed of corruption.
> The narrative they "investigated" was so obviously false, bodycam evidence directly contradicted multiple key facts. Officials are interested only seeking to prove the case. Thankfully the jury came to the right verdict.
I don't get it, if they only care about prosecuting and proving the case, wouldn't they go by the bodycam evidence? They didn't prove the case. Maybe if their incentive was to prosecute and prove the charges, they'd go by the obvious evidence. Or am I missing something here?
In my experience, the narrative the prosecutor argued on behalf of the accuser was obviously false because specific key facts were contradicted by bodycam statements, for example
"He took my phone and it was dead" -> bodycam showed her using the phone when police arrived
I provided a recording of my accuser clearly being drunk, aggressive, threatening me while I was de-escalating. I was the one who called 911 to stop her from drunk driving. Her speech clearly slurred.
Instead of realizing her story doesn't add up, the prosecutor brought in a DV expert to explain how it's typical for abusers to call 911 and that her behavior was a normal reaction to being assaulted.
Imo they're right, if you're faced with the option of running away from some crazy person or interacting with the police in the USA, the safer option is to run.
A police interaction can escalate to ruinous heights within seconds due to no fault of your own. Remember that cop that got scared by an acorn falling and started shooting at random? I don't care how many "good cops" there are, I'm not rolling the dice on encountering an acorn cop.
Society went through the necessary lessons with DNA and fingerprints. Putting people in jail because the computer produce a match is a terrible idea, especially when its done by an proprietary dark box that no one really understand why it claims there is a match. It can be used as a tool of investigations to give the investigators an hint to find real more substantial clues, but using it like in fiction where the computer can act as the single truth is terrible for society and justice.
A month ago or so people on HN discussed facial recognition when looking victims and perpetrators in child exploitation material, and people were complaining that meta did not allow this fast enough. Neither the article or the people in that discussion draw any connection that the issues in this article could happen. People seemingly want to think that the lesson is "Never go back to North Dakota", as that is a much easier lesson than considering false positives in detection algorithms and their impact on a legal system that is constrained in budget, time, training and incentives.
Yes, of course someone should have investigated, but the larger point here is that people don’t because they are being sold a false narrative that AI is infallible and can do anything.
We could sit here all day arguing “you should always validate the results”, but even on HN there are people loudly advocating that you don’t need to.
I don't think people on HN think "AI is infallible", I think people on HN believe HN is sufficient enough for "most tasks". In the context of HN "most tasks" refers to programming tasks, not arresting and jailing people tasks.
You should always validate the results, but there is an inherint difference between an AI generated tool for personal use and a tool which could be used to destroy someones life.
The problem is that the people who will put this in place rate capability on a linear scale: in their view the ability to write software is sufficiently magic, so such an ability is obviously good enough to recognize criminals. From their perspective, there are hurdles to be crossed (like probable cause) and an AI flagging a suspect feels like a magical intelligence crossing those hurdles and allowing them to continue in the process.
They don't validate the results of their fellow officers, or the validity of warrants, or anything else that predicates an arrest. Why would they start with this?
What about cops and legislators? They thing AI is infallible and thats very convenient for them since they can thus not mandate cops having to double check tmwhat the AI suggests
Where are you seeing people being told that AI is infallible? AI is being hyped to the moon, but "infallible" is not one of the claims.
To the extent people trust AI to be infallible, it's just laziness and rapport (AI is rarely if ever rude without prompting, nor does it criticize extensive question-asking as many humans would, it's the quintessential enabler[1]) that causes people to assume that because it's useful and helpful for so many things, it'll be right about everything.
The models all have disclaimers that state the inverse. People just gradually lose sight of that.
[1] This might be the nature of LLMs, or it might be by design, similar to social media slop driving engagement. It's in AI companies' interest to have people buying subscriptions to talk with AIs more. If AI goes meta and critiques the user (except in more serious cases like harm to self or others, or specific kinds of cultural wrongthink), that's bad for business.
> To the extent people trust AI to be infallible, it's just laziness and rapport (…) that causes people to assume that because it's useful and helpful for so many things, it'll be right about everything.
Why it happens is secondary to the fact that it does.
> The models all have disclaimers that state the inverse. People just gradually lose sight of that.
Those disclaimers are barely effective (if at all), and everyone knows that. Including the ones putting them there.
"The trauma, loss of liberty, and reputational damage cannot be easily fixed,” Lipps' lawyers told CNN in an email.
That sounds a LOT like a statement you make for before suing for damages, not to mention they literally say "Her lawyers are exploring civil rights claims but have yet to file a lawsuit, they said."
This lady probably just wants to go back to normal life and get some money for the hell they put her in. She has never been on a airplane before, I doubt she is going to take on the entire system like you suggest. Easier said than done to "challenge the entire system", what does that even mean exactly?
It was worse than that, the reporting from an earlier story[0]
...Unable to pay her bills from jail, she lost her home, her car and even her dog.
There is not a jury in the country that will side against the woman. I am not even sure who will make the best pop culture mashup - John Wick or a country song writer?
(Also, what happened to journalism - no Oxford comma?)
Well, omitting the Oxford comma is the traditionally correct thing to do. I use the Oxford comma, it makes sense, but it is new. A hundred years ago it would have been considered an error by nearly every editor.
TBF isn't it rather unreasonable that our system permits your home to be foreclosed while you're detained prior to a hearing?
Also rather unreasonable to arrest someone who is clearly neither violent nor a flight risk. You could literally hold the trial via video conference at that point and there would be no downside.
At the risk of sounding like more of an anarchist (irony, autocorrect went with absurdist which isn’t entirely wrong either) than I might usually feel, that all depends on who you believe the system is for and works for? If you believe it’s “capitalism” as been so often proven, then it could be said that it’s entirely “reasonable”.
> depends on who you believe the system is for and works for
We are still enough of a democracy to blame ourselves for this. We could choose that the system is of the people, by the people, for the people. I think too many of us simply don't agree with that, except in the narrow situation where we are talking about ourself.
We could just overcome the tens of billions shoved into our faces aimed at undermining it and brainwashing us, and choose that the system is of the people?
The deck is so unbelievably stacked against it.
Another thing: many people hav e been permitted to vote in let's say 40 elections (at different levels), out of which maybe 1 had a candidate that indeed supported a "system that is of the people", and 39 didn't. Gets tough then doesn't it.
iirc the dog was a dangerous animal and had attacked people and animals uprovoked quite a few times. didnt hear about it so not sure about the horses, but typically people dont just execute horses when they aren't injured or at risk of living out a traumatic existence. who knows, media spins and all that jazz, but I wouldn't hesitate to end a liability of a dangerous dog or a horse in suffering that had no chance of recovery, however reluctant id feel in the moment
The real problem here is she'll get money, who knows how much, but that ultimately does nothing to actually address the problems in the system.
Effectively it just raises taxes to cover the cost of these failed prosecutions.
Everytime one of these cases happens, a cop and a prosecutor should be out of a job permanently. Possibly even jailed. The false arrest should lose the cop their job and get them blacklisted, the prosecution should lose the prosecutor's right to practice law.
And if the police union doesn't like that and decides to strike, every one of those cops should simply be fired. Much like we did to the ATC. We'd be better off hiring untrained civilians as cops than to keep propping up this system of warrior cops abusing the citizens.
> The false arrest should lose the cop their job and get them blacklisted
There is actually a federal register for LEOs that have been terminated for cause or resigned to avoid termination.
The police unions that operate in the jurisdictions that employ 70% of US police have negotiated into their CBAs that the register “cannot be used for hiring or promotional decisions”. Read into that what you will.
I'm generally pretty for unions, but the police union is one that's a complete cancer on society. It pretty much solely exists to make sure cops are free to harm the public without any sort of accountability.
Agreed. And I think we really, really need to put more effort into a "police the police" organization. Someone who has power only over the police, who the police do not have power over, to act as a check.
... test my support for the idea of unionization. I have even said in the past that I think public sector unions are especially important because their boss (the people) are the most capricious and malicious of all.
Maybe we could find a way to put guardrails on what they could and could not negotiate into a contract. Wages, benefits, basic job environmental conditions, stuff like that -- okay. But administrative policies which exist to prevent bad behavior should be non-negotiable.
It's not the police union's fault that there is literally zero pushback against them.
Somehow Teacher unions have near zero power but cops can collectively bargain for the right to murder people to get a paid vacation.
It isn't because they have a union. Most of them don't have more than a high school diploma and minimal training. You can replace them with ease. A strike shouldn't even be considered a threat. They often can't strike, and their normal threat is work to rule, ie follow the law.
It isn't the police union that keeps judges from throwing the book at cops. It isn't the police union that keeps 40% of the country rabidly insistent that gently reforming police would turn this country to ash. It isn't the union that forces them to die in car crashes far more often than they ever face lethal violence.
A union isn't magically powerful and never can be. The employer can always just replace the members. Funny how that keeps unions in check for such skilled jobs as Teachers and Bureaucrats and Nurses and ATC employees, but for people who usually have just a high school diploma and a few weeks of training suddenly it's impossible call the strike's bluff? I hear TSA bodies are desperate for work.
It's a narrative. Police unions are allowed to exist to encourage you to hate unions. Police unions have correctly identified that nobody even attempts to push back against them and are simply doing their job: Advocating for their members. You aren't required to accept a Union's terms. America is chock full of better trained private security that would be happy to scalp a police force.
Hell, police departments are often run by political candidates. Why don't the pro-union ones just get voted out by supposedly anti-union people?
What makes police unions different from other unions is cops have a lot more power to make life miserable for their political enemies. They have effectively a legal right to harass anyone they'd like.
The worst a teachers union can do is strike.
Cops can assault and murder people then claim self defense. It's unlikely another cop will arrest them, and it's unlikely a prosecutor will actually do their job in prosecuting them.
This sort of undue power is what enabled Joe Arpaio to setup a concentration camp. That's somewhat the extreme of what cops can do. And he did, eventually, get prosecuted for it (though he was pardoned). But that was literally after years of those sorts of stunts. [1]
I can guarantee that Arpaio isn't the only corrupt cop out there. He just got too much national attention which ultimately ended his career.
It absolutely was. There's no question of this. Now we need to ask how was the system marketed, what did the police pay for it, how were they trained to use it?
> anybody bothered to ask her "where were you the morning of july 10th between 3 and 4pm.
Legally that amounts "hearsay" and cannot have any value. Those statements probably won't even be admissible in court without other supporting facts entered in first.
> we are all guilty until cleared.
This is not at a phenomenon that started with AI. If you scratch the surface, even slightly, you'll find that this is a common strategy used against defendants who are perceived as not being financially or logistically capable of defending themselves.
We have a private prison industry. The line between these two outcomes is very short.
> Legally that amounts "hearsay" and cannot have any value. Those statements probably won't even be admissible in court without other supporting facts entered in first.
I just want to understand your argument: you believe that any alibi provided is hearsay, and has no legal value, and that they can't even take the statement in order to validate it? That's your position?
The condition here being she was already arrested. You don't arrest someone first and then try to establish their alibi second. That would be an investigation which would be prior to getting a warrant which would allow you to arrest someone. You will never talk yourself out of an arrest, you might talk yourself out of an investigation.
You can offer your story to the police but the fact that you did or what you said to them will not come into evidence in court. You cannot call the officer to the stand and then ask them to repeat in court what you said. That would be "hearsay." So, for a lot of reasons, if you're already arrested, you probably don't even want to tell them any of that. It can only be used against you and never for you. Get your lawyer and have them ready the case to prove that alibi for you.
You're never going to get your statements made in an interrogation into the record as exculpatory evidence.
The purpose of the interrogation is to find _other crimes_ you are also guilty of and charge you with those.
The police are not going to build a case against you, arrest you, and then immediately try to destroy their own case.
There's some real Hollywood confusion here.
There are two legal issues here. First is fighting the false arrest. Your statements will not help you here. Second is a civil rights violation case. The police negligence, if it can be established, is the basis of your case.
In either scenario your stated alibi is not meaningful.
"I saw her at the library" is firsthand testimony.
"I saw her library card in her pocket" is firsthand testimony.
"She was at the library - Bob told me so" is hearsay. Just look at the word - "hear say". Hearsay is testifying about events where your knowledge does not come from your own firsthand observations of the event itself.
That's fair, I'll admit to getting it slightly wrong.
However, the original topic had nothing to do with that as far as I could tell, and instead was claiming it was hearsay for her to testify about her own whereabouts. That is simply not at all true, regardless of my error.
Agree in principle. But people like her does not have the resources, financially and emotionally to go through the legal system again. Unless there are charitable lawyers who are willing to do it on her behalf for free.
Clearview again. ICE is using it too, and their people think it is an oracle that is always correct, so that when someone shows a passport card or a RealID showing that they are someone else, a US citizen or permanent resident, they are usually accused of having a fake ID. It's a flawed tool and it misidentifies people sometimes.
The vendor they used, Clearview AI, does not allow you to request data deletion unless you live in one of the half-dozen states that legally mandate it.
To get your data deleted in the states that require it you have to submit a photo of yourself which I really don't want to do for a sketchy company with ties to evil billionaire Peter Thiel.
For IL residents the policy requires collection and retention of your biomarkers. Presumably there is a law enforcement exclusion implicitly or explicitly, eg search via administrative warrant.
Sadly this is really the only tool we have right now. Just have to keep spamming them with delete requests because once they delete it’ll end up back in their database eventually.
For me the worst thing in this case is that a JUDGE signed off on an arrest warrant with only a clearview match linking Ms Lipps to the crime.
A judge and the warrant process are supposed to be the safeguard against police doing shady stuff (like relying on an AI hit to decide who commit a crime). But if the judges can't be bothered...
First, the detective used the FaceSketchID system, which has been around since around 2014. It is not new or uniquely tied to modern AI.
Second, the system only suggests possible matches. It is still up to the detective to investigate further and decide whether to pursue charges. And then it is up to court to issue the warrant.
The real question is why she was held in jail for four months. That is the part that I do not understand. My understanding is that there is 30-day limit (the requesting state must pick up the defendant within 30 day).
Regarding the individual involved, Angela Lipps, she has reportedly been arrested before, so it is possible she was on parole. So maybe they were holding her because of that?
In the US there are no consequences for people in power failing to follow procedures, laws or regulations - except for being told to stop doing whatever illegal thing they're doing, and possibly getting sued way down the line, which gets paid by taxpayers.
From reading more into the case, it seems the issue may be related to how her lawyer handled the case.
They probably did “identity challenge” arguing that she is not the right person. But from Tennessee’s perspective, she was considered the correct person to be arrested, so there was no “mistaken identity” in their system. In other words, North Dakota Wanted person x and here is person x.
Once a judge in North Dakota reviewed the full evidence (and found that person they issued warrant for arrest is not one they want), the case was dismissed.
The judge likely issued the warrant based on the detective’s sworn testimony. In most cases, a judge does not have the ability or detailed knowledge to independently verify whether the detective completed all necessary checks.
This situation likely resulted from either sloppy investigative work or an honest mistake: the detective believed her booking photo matched the individual captured on camera.
Because the police or the prosecutor or whatever can ask for whatever they want, but it's up to the judge to refuse their stupid claims. Though the others should get some blame too.
You get charged with something and if you want to have the trial right now, before you have any idea what's going on, then you can insist, which basically nobody does because it's pretty crazy to go in blind
Actually most criminal defense attorneys recommend not waiving your speedy trial rights. Yes, the defense goes in blind. But so does the prosecution, and they're the ones that have to make a case.
The usual result for defendants that don't waive their speedy trial rights is an acquittal if the case goes to trial (between 50-60%), which doesn't sound like a lot but prosecutors are expected to win >90% of their trials. Additionally, in many counties they don't have sufficient courtrooms to handle all the criminal trials within the speedy trial timeframe, so if the trial date comes and a courtroom is not available the case is dismissed with prejudice. Nonviolent misdeameanors are the lowest priority for a courtroom (and by that I mean even family law cases have priority over nonviolent misdos in most counties), so those cases are frequently dismissed a day or two before the trial date. Consequently, most prosecutors will offer better and better plea bargains as the trial date approaches.
This is even more true for murders, which is why murder suspects don't usually get charged for a year or two after the crime.
This isn’t how it works, you can invoke your right to a speedy trial at any point you want. You can spend 2 months waiting and then invoke it if you want.
The timer starts from when you invoke it, though.
The 2 issues, which she may be caught in, are that it’s “speedy” from the perspective of a court, and that it really means “free from undue delays”.
There is no general definition of a speedy trial, but I think the shortest period any state defines is a month (with some states considering several months to still be “speedy”).
A trial can still be speedy even past that window if the prosecution can make a case that they genuinely need more time (like waiting for lab tests to come back).
It’s basically only ever not speedy if the prosecution is just not doing anything.
> The real question is why she was held in jail for four months. That is the part that I do not understand. My understanding is that there is 30-day limit (the requesting state must pick up the defendant within 30 day). Regarding the individual involved, Angela Lipps, she has reportedly been arrested before, so it is possible she was on parole. So maybe they were holding her because of that?
As the article gestures towards, challenging the extradition can greatly extend the timeline, from 30 days after the arrest to 90 days after a formal identity hearing. Which isn't fair and isn't intuitive, but is unfortunately a long-standing part of the system. (Even worse, this kind of mistaken identity can't be challenged in an extradition hearing; the question isn't whether she's the person who committed the crime but whether she's the person identified in the warrant.)
> It is still up to the detective to investigate further and decide whether to pursue charges. And then it is up to court to issue the warrant.
This is how it should work, but I still think it is important to discuss these failures in the context of AI risks.
One of the largest real-world dangers of AI (as we define that now) is that it is often confidently wrong and this is a terrible situation when it comes to human factors.
A lot of people are wired in such a way that perceived confidence hacks right through their amygdala and they immediately default to trust, no matter how unwarranted.
Her picture was used as part of a fake id card, in the commission of a crime. The fuzzy camera footage looked like her (from stills I've seen) and her picture was on the fake ID. Those 2 circumstantial items were, apparently, enough to have a warrant issued.
They picked her up in TN and held her for 4 months, even after:
The ND police knew the ID was fake and the person using it was not her.
The ND police knew she had been in TN before, during, and after the crime.
She is still technically a suspect, even after all of this has come out.
From the first time the story surfaced, for spurious reasons[1] she was booked as fugitive, and that made it so that there was "no need" for normal timeframe of hearing.
[1] The reason being that she was found in Tennessee while being searched for a crime in another state, thus allowing them to treat it as interstate fugitive from a crime scene
This isn't the first time this month I've read about someone suffering consequences of mistaken identity after their facial recognition said they look like someone who committed a crime. I'm sure this is starting to happen at an alarming rate.
The fundamental problem is that among the 350 million people living in the United States, there are a lot of pairs of people who look pretty darn similar. It used to be impractical to ask a question like "who in the US looks like the person in this security footage", and so as a matter of practicality, once you found someone who looks like the suspect, you probably also have other evidence, even if it's pretty weak, linking them to the crime.
But with AI, you can ask "who in the US looks like this person", and so we need to re-calibrate what it means if all you know is that someone looks like a suspect. I am of the opinion that "looks like someone," in the absence of any other evidence, is reasonable suspicion, but not probable cause, that you are the person you look like. Reasonable suspicion is enough for the police to stop you on the street and ask for your ID, but not enough to arrest you. There are other data points that alone might not even be reasonable suspicion, but could be combined with "looks like someone" to make probable cause, such as "was near the place at the time the crime happened".
AI isn't really the problem, even whether or not the AI's determination that two people look alike is valid or reviewed by a human isn't the problem. The problem is assuming that because two people look alike they must be the same person, even if you have no other evidence of them being the same person.
I've been hearing "it's not just... it's a" touted as an AI sign recently, personally I think it's an AI sign because it's a human thinking shortcut sign, and AI copies it, but it would be funny if AI wrote the article and then hallucinated this specific money quote.
I doubt this happened here, but FWIW, AI does have a habit of "cleaning up" (read: hallucinating) interview transcript quotes if you ask it to go through a transcript and pull quotes. You have to prompt AI very specifically to get it to not "clean up" the quotes when you ask it to do that task.
The actual scariest part isn't that the AI got it wrong... it's that nobody felt the need to verify the AI. A tip from an anonymous caller can get investigated and found out if its true or not, and a match from a facial recognition system apparently does not. People haven't built better investigative tools they've just built better ways to skip around the investigation.
It’s a classic example of the base rate fallacy. The judge sees that a system with a seemingly high accuracy rate (like 99.999% accurate) has flagged a person, and they assume that means the person is highly likely to be guilty.
However, the system uses a dragnet approach, and is checking against millions of people. If you are checking 300 million people, that 99.999% accuracy check is going to find 3,000 people, and AT LEAST 99.96% of those people are going to be innocent.
This is why we can’t have wide, automated surveillance.
So cops used AI to attempt to investigate a crime. But, there was no crime - the arrest was wrong. Why can cops excuse themselves here for delegating their responsibilities (protecting society, allegedly that is) onto software? AI may also be written by some corporations to "tweak" this or that, see this foreign-looking guy being more likely to be AI-investigated. This is like the movie Minority Report - but stupid. IMO the courts should conclude that cops should not be allowed to use AI without having a prior, independently verified objective reasoning for any investigation. This mass sniffing that is currently going on is very clearly illegal. The current orange guy does not care about the law; see flock cameras aka spy cameras employed by the government on all car drivers at all times.
You're absolutely right! There was a crime. I appreciate the course correction—it’s a significant oversight on my part. I've updated our previous plan to better reflect that a crime occurred. You're under arrest.
... which is why the institutions that assign responsibility and consequences need to make it really clear that excuse won't fly. With illustrative examples.
There is enormous variability in how hard a tool is to use correctly, how likely it is to go wrong, and how severe the consequences are. AI has a wide range on all those variables because its use cases vary so widely compared to a hammer.
The use case here is police facial recognition. Not hitting nails. The parent wasn't saying "AI is a liability" with no context.
When somebody uses a tool to hurt somebody, they need to be held accountable. If I smack you with a hammer, that needs to be prosecuted. Using AI is no different.
The problem here is incidental to the tool; it was done by the cops and therefore nobody will be held accountable.
Systems are also a tool. Whoever institutes and helps build the system that systematically results in harm is also responsible.
That would be the vendors, the system planners, and the institutions that greenlit this. It would also include the larger financial tech circle that is trying to drive large scale AI adoption. Like Peter Thiel, who sees technology as an "alternative to politics". I.e. a way to circumvent democracy [1]
Nonsense. The manufacturer, distributor, and vendor of a hammer are not liable for its misuse. We already litigated and then legislated this regarding guns in the US.
As much as I detest Clearview and Thiel the fault for this incident falls squarely on the justice system.
Your first paragraph conflates the system with the tool. Please at least parse what I wrote before you respond.
You are also conflating legality and morality. The US gun industry being good at lobbying has no bearing on whether an industry that enables mass school shootings is accountable or not. I mean it clearly is. Just compare gun deaths in the US to any civilized nation and you'll see that gun control is the moral and sane approach.
A hammer/gun is not the same as the wider hammer/gun industrial system, and the societal systems it is a part of. The justice system is a part of that. So even though you say you disagree, somehow you still agree?
> Your first paragraph conflates the system with the tool.
No, it responds to the claim you made. You asserted that systems are also tools and attributed fault on that basis. Perhaps at least reread your own comment before condescending.
> You are also conflating legality and morality.
Also incorrect. I understood you to be claiming tool vendors to bear both legal and moral responsibility; perhaps I misunderstood. Regardless, my position is that tool vendors bear neither of those more or less unconditionally. The only way a tool vendor can become responsible in any sense (IMO) is if they knowingly and intentionally facilitate a particular outcome. The manufacturer of a hammer, gun, or AI facial recognition system is never at fault for what the user does with it unless they actively encouraged that particular use.
This tool, however, is specifically built for mass surveillance. It serves no other purpose. The tool is broken, and everybody knows it. The tool makers are at least as guilty as those who use it.
The tool is unethical, not broken. And unfortunately remains legal for the time being. To that end it's a social or political problem that can be fixed.
Yes. But doing the investigation negates much of the incentive for using AI.
Look for similar to play out elsewhere --- using unreliable tools for decision making is not a good, responsible business plan. And lawyers are just waiting to press the point.
In this case it sounds as though AI could have been used to generate preliminary leads. When someone calls a tip line with information, police don’t just take their word for it, they investigate it. They know that tips they receive may be incorrect. They should have done the exact same here, but they didn’t.
I’m very opposed to AI in general, but this one is clearly human failure.
The noteworthy AI angle is the undeserved credence police gave to AI information. But that is ultimately their failure; they should be investigating all information they receive.
The failure starts with tool vendors who market these statistical/probabilistic pattern searchers as "intelligent". The Fargo police failed to fully evaluate these marketing claims before applying them to their work.
So in the same way that the failure rolled down hill, liability needs to roll back up.
The article says that the Fargo police claimed to have done "additional investigative steps independent of AI". (Perhaps they're lying, or did a poor job because they thought the extra steps were a formality.)
Given the actual outcome it’s hard to imagine what they actually did. It would be less embarrassing for them if they had said they did no additional investigating.
It's not even the right question, really. If they found some crazy coincidence that genuinely seemed to corroborate the identification, it's still not OK that this woman was dragged across the country. They rightly identify that the initial AI scan was wrong to do even if everything that followed was by the book. Our law enforcement processes were developed in a context where this kind of error was much harder because there was no routine way to scan every person in the United States for people who look like your suspect.
Look, I'm generally considered AI's most vociferous detractor.
But...
> there is no way to tell if you are using it "correctly".
This simply isn't true, at least in cases like this.
I know common sense isn't really all that common, but why would you give more credence to an untested tool than an untested crack-addled human informant?
The entire point of the informant, or the AI in this instance, is to generate leads. Which subsequently need to be checked.
We will find out. But relying on AI is likely to cost the city of Fargo in one way or another. They say they have already stopped using AI and returned to good old fashioned human investigation.
What kind of outcome results from misuse? Clearly a hammer's misuse has very little in common with a global, hivemind network used in high-stake campaigns.
Now, if I misused a hammer and it hurt everyone's thumb in my country, then maybe what you said would have some merit.
Otherwise, I'd say it's an extremely lazy argument
AFAIK the actual cause for our high incarceration rate is that we have longer sentences. The conviction rate, for example, as compared to the UK is similar.
Computing has traditionally been all about math and logic. This is really all that a binary logic computer is capable of. When applied to this purpose, it can offer highly accurate results at very low cost.
Current AI is an attempt to branch out from simply calculating into decision making. But it does so in the worst possible way --- using probability and statistics (aka guesswork) instead of logic and reasoning. In other words, AI offers questionable results at high cost.
As this article shows, relying on guesswork is a legal liability issue waiting to happen in many (if not most) operating environments.
Heh, I wasn't suggesting that AI would actually replace decision-making. Rather, I wonder whether attempts to use AI in this way would result in such publicly-embarassing and catastrophic outcomes that software engineers might decide to organize professional guardrails about it.
I fully agree, this seems like a legal liability issue waiting to happen.
This, she likely had a shitty public defender that did the bare minimum requirements because they were catering to paying clients. The state was playing hardball because they wanted to make a profit off the poor person with a shitty defense and the public defender was sitting on the bench at a teeball tournament because they werent getting paid enough and didn't want to try.
What? Women are much more sympathetic figures when it comes to crime and punishment. And there are 10x more men in prison in america than women. If you were trying to "introduce" some nefarious law enforcement system to the US you would use it on undesirable men first (drug addicts and gang members)
Probably just reading the room, with States like texas making abortions illegal and allowing random citizens from enforcing that.
Famously, abortions are a woman thing.
Anyway, looking through the facts, it's just some random woman. There's better evidence that these facial recognition systems are much worse at minorities rather than genders.
Although you can probably interpret the facts differently, we've seen how any search function gets enshittified: Once people get used to searching for things, they tend to select something that returns results vs something that fails to return results.
Rather than the user blaming themselves, they blame the searcher. As such, any search system overtime will bias towards returning search (eg, Outlook), rather than accuracy.
So if these systems easily miss certain classes of people, women, minorities, they'll more likely be surfaced as inaccurate matches rather than men who'll have a higher confidence of being screened out.
Has it not been fairly common to require police officers to have a bachelor’s degree? Or an associate’s? I think recently that has been relaxed but I’ve lived in places where it was absolutely a requirement.
Police departments are known to avoid hiring people that get high marks in school, under the principle that such individuals will become bored with the job and quit. They literally look for average people with average intelligence: C students.
Now factor in the slow decline of our educational institutions, where grade inflation has systematically diminished the credibility of a degree. I would wager that many C students today would have failed out completely 30 years ago.
In that light, it is not surprising that people are seeing ICE agents behave like brown shirts. No one in power wants those people asking any kind of hard questions about what they are being ordered to do.
I've been called an intellectual snob before, because I tended to look down on people unfairly. I've even been tested (with a real test, not some online crap) as having a fairly high IQ. So I find it interesting that I'm now being accused of thinking too highly of the ~50% of the population with IQ between 85 and 115.
In any case I stand by my assessment. Someone with a 100 IQ is perfectly capable of being a competent, well behaved police officer. And while your article suggests that lethality increases with lower IQs, I do think some of the biggest assholes I've ever had the displeasure of interacting with were legitimately brilliant otherwise. I wouldn't want them given power over others.
> Someone with a 100 IQ is perfectly capable of being a competent, well behaved police officer.
Sure. But, depending on which source you use, 104 or 98.4 is average, and the standard deviation is between 11 and 14. If we use the most generous of those numbers, that would still mean that 21% of the police have an IQ below 93.
And while a policeman with an IQ below 93 might even manage to do most things OK, I submit that the amount of training necessary to get them to understand the limitations of AI is almost certainly much higher than what they have received to date.
Whether it's AI that flagged her, or a witness who saw her, or her IP address appeared on the logs. Did anybody bothered to ask her "where were you the morning of july 10th between 3 and 4pm. But that's not what happened, they saw the data and said "we got her".
But this is the worst part of the story:
> And after her ordeal, she never plans to return to the state: “I’m just glad it’s over,” she told WDAY. “I’ll never go back to North Dakota.”
That's the lesson? Never go back to North Dakota. No, challenge the entire system. A few years back it was a kid accused of shoplifting [0]. Then a man dragged while his family was crying [1]. Unless we fight back, we are all guilty until cleared.
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/29/apple_sis_lawsuit/
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23628394
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