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A comment on A one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition. Parent comment

Re:A one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition by bko on Thursday June 11, 2020 @07:20AM (#23487602)
The problem of disproportionate representation is a problem whether you're using technology or not. It's not a new problem or specific to tech. If a large percentage of dangerous interactions a police officer has with an individual fits a certain profile (e.g. the third party was a man), the police officer will likely exhibit a different set of behaviors when dealing with that party. Sometimes it's appropriate, many times it's not. Same is true for judges and others in the system and you'll see stricter sentencing for certain groups. This results can lead to a self-reinforcing cycle of oppression.

The difference is with technology these biases can at least try to be addressed directly and create an objective more fair system.

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Re:A one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition by bobthepanda on Thursday June 11, 2020 @05:30PM (#23493468)
The major issue is that the tech is not ready. If you reduce the false positive rate by 5% but you facilitate processing 20% more claims (to use some arbitrary numbers) you are still increasing the absolute number of false positives by 14%. With the punitive American justice system, that is 14% more people who will be detained unjustly, and then when they leave they will be denied most opportunities for housing, jobs, and other things needed to participate in society.

Technology can address biases but we need to make sure that they are addressed sufficiently, so that we do not end up causing more problems than we solve.

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Re:A one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition by radarsat1 on Saturday June 13, 2020 @04:10AM (#23507775)
> If you reduce the false positive rate by 5% but you facilitate processing 20% more claims (to use some arbitrary numbers) you are still increasing the absolute number of false positives by 14%.

This is a really interesting point that I'll keep in the back of my mind, thanks for that! I hadn't even thought it through in such a concrete manner but I think this really hits the nail on the head.

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