London's facial recognition trial scanned 500,000 faces and caught no one

my mom lives in small town that only has two roads in/out of town and the police have alprs on those. there's no violent crime there, and all the police department does is traffic (DWI's, speeding and parking tickets, and accidents) and respond to small town crime (noise complaints, stolen bicycle, stray/lost dogs etc). I think the only thing that the alpr has ever caught people for is out of date vehicle registrations - but now the police department wants a flock camera because they are "great crime fighting tools"

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?

I've had an idea in the back of my head but I'm no businessman so have this one for free.

Build an AI model, train it from the catalogues of JD Sports and Sports Direct (and other brands like Stone Island etc.) and how to detect balaclavas, illegal electric bikes and e-scooters. Have it link to cameras and do a percentage chance using machine learning on chance of crime. Also increase the percentage if a 'wheely' is done (riding only on back wheel).

Would minority report the majority of crime in this country in one fell swoop.

Could call it ScroteScanner.

Some would call it discrimination but the majority of ASB I see around my area are people dressed/using those exact things.

If they start to catch-on (unlikely) then worse case we have a fancier looking society with gangsters in suits again.

Man we technologists are so bad at dealing with societal issues.

We try to reinvent something that claims that keeps tabs on everyone and for sure will punish you if you don’t behave well but will reward you if do!

The thing has a name. It’s the religion.

I’m very against this type of pervasive surveillance, but that number seems implausible. The police may have only loaded a small group of suspects into the system, only targeted specific individuals, or some other reason we’re not aware of. The police protecting some criminals wouldn’t be a departure from standard practice in the UK.

I note this line in the article which suggests to me that they have very likely limited the watchlist and perhaps excluded certain racial groups to avoid more accusations of bias which leads to less arrests.

“A particularly important point is that watchlist growth has been deliberate, controlled and aligned to BTP policy. We began with a more limited watchlist whilst ensuring data quality, governance and safeguarding arrangements were robust.”

This reads to me as weasel words that basically imply they are almost certainly limiting the watch list to likely now avoid certain categories of people who they really don't want to catch because then they would inevitably end up fielding accusations of being 'institutionally racist'.

This is because last year in Croydon (along with various other areas in you search articles on the subject) they apparently have found quite a lot of alleged criminals with facial recognition technology.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cddpzglzrv7o

"More than 170 alleged criminals, including a woman wanted for more than 20 years, were arrested during a six-month trial of live facial recognition (LFR) in south London."

But then there was also this one where it turned out it was a little bit too successful in picking up black people leading to accusations of racial bias, although it could also be there are just more people with criminal history in that community for various reasons.

https://news.sky.com/story/essex-police-pauses-use-of-live-f...

"Essex Po […]

I don’t think it’s fair to conclude this doesn’t work at all.

The reason they did not get any arrests could be that sought-for criminals now avoid those stations. Given that there are relatively few of such criminals, that’s hard to prove or disprove (traffic would go down, but only by a slight amount)

It also could mean such criminals already avoided those stations, to start with. Again, hard to prove.

It also might mean people misbehave less now at these stations. So, did the number of incidents at such stations go down?

That, I think should be easier to (dis)prove, but also doesn’t require running live face recognition. Recording and only looking at recordings after an issue is reported would be the better option.

The cameras in UK are there to remember citizens that they are watched. They are there for when there are peaceful protests to remember citizens that they are watched. Surveillance state created by cameras on the streets and tracking on everybody's phones is perfectly ok for our rulers.

I hear again and again that China is "bad" but I see that western countries copy everything from them... except going after big corporations. We will gather personal data and have files for each citizen, punish peaceful protests, use social media to control the masses but punishing the rich like China does is unacceptable. That seems to be the red line that the West will not cross, the one that protects billionaries.

I guess that tells you how expensive travelling by trains is then, if in 6 months only 500k unique faces were captured or identified. That is roughly 3k per day or 120-150 every hour or 2-3 every minute across multiple stations.

Unfortunately, this exercise would be labelled as too expensive to be scaled, the irony.

Surely, the preference for the department is buying rather than building their own cost effective solutions inhouse which would be scalable rather than limited.

Look at France and Netherlands, their government departments are already working on reducing reliance on microsoft products. This has to come from the very top, rather than being consumers these departments with their budgets should become tech producers.