Thread

500k facial scans at UK stations yield no arrests, 1 false positive

518 points · 305 comments · ilamont

jwally · 1790684914 · focus · HN ↗
I was thinking about this with flock cameras the other day...what's our actual ROI? Was the world horrible before and these initiatives are going to close a monster crime gap or is this just a giant fishing expedition ... just because?
1. pj_mukh · 1790688931 · focus · HN ↗
  Can we cut to the bone a little bit? The recent crime panics are not about a partner assaulting their live-in partner or a random home burglary. There is no real "ROI" to be had.
  It's purely about the unease of living in chaotic cities, the random stabbings, the shoplifting, the visible homelessness etc. Flock is the stopgap here.
  Partly the "feeling" of chaos is just that, a feeling, driven significantly by algorithmic feeds feeding us every random crime from around the country 24/7. Husband murders wife in a murderous rage? No one hear's about it. Mentally ill man murders a woman on the train in a Tier 2 city, immediate nationwide breaking news.
  The other part though is a real dissolution in how we take care of our mentally ill. Complex topic [1].
  I think complaining about Flock is complaining about the symptom. Today we dogpile on Flock to get it cancelled, tomorrow the public will reach for something else. We have to fix the underlying disease, which is a combination of the two factors above.
  [1]: <a href="https://time.com/6265241/america-care-of-mentally-ill-people/" rel="nofollow">https://time.com/6265241/america-care-of-mentally-ill-people...
  1. thinkingtoilet · 1790690611 · focus · HN ↗
    Let us also acknowledged that we're living in the safest time in history and modern American cities are extremely safe, despite the unhinged propaganda from the right.
    hollerith · 1790691623 · focus · HN ↗
    Some American cities like St Louis, Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans have averaged about 50 homicides per 100,000 per year over the last 10 years. Detroit averaged about 40.
    It is not "unhinged propaganda from the right" for people living in those cities to wonder why the rate cannot be under 2.5 per 100,000 like it is in most European cities. Except for a few years in the early 2000s, London's rate has stayed below 2.5 for the last 250 years.
    pjc50 · 1790691809 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, but nobody likes the answer: American police are both excessively violent and bad at actually policing. It is fixable but it requires doing things differently, e.g. <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20260626-how-scotland-changed-the-way-it-tackled-violence" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20260626-how-scotland-c...

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.