NYPD used a photo of Hollywood actor Woody Harrelson to catch a thief, who looks a lot like him, using the city's facial recognition system The incident happened almost two years ago, but it became known about it only a few days ago. Due to the fact that the law enforcement agencies had a very poor quality photo, they uploaded a high-resolution photo of the actor, which they found on the Internet, into the facial recognition system.
Interestingly, it worked - the system was able to find several suitable people in New York, after which the police found the thief and soon arrested him. The culprit was found guilty of stealing beer from a store on a nearby street.
According to the Georgetown University report, law enforcement officers from the New York Department often feel free to use photographs of innocent people to find criminals like them. One of the most striking cases was when a photo of a player from a famous basketball club was uploaded to the facial recognition system, thanks to which the police arrested a thief on the other side of the city.
Researchers believe police officers are negligent with their tools, and although the recognition system has only been used 3,000 times in the past 5 years, no one can guarantee that uploading false photographs will not lead to arrests or charges of any than innocent citizens. The police adhere to the position "in war, all means are good" and clarify that because of just one coincidence in the parameters of appearance, no one is imprisoned.
The question of the professionalism of this approach remains open, more interesting is something else: how does the "deception" of the face recognition system occur? To clearly demonstrate this, scientists gave several examples. First, sketches are created from the words of the victims, and on their basis there are photographs of people (most often innocent, but sometimes they are already in the police database for other cases). The pictures are uploaded to the system, and it finds the right criminal.
Recall that in August last year, the first criminal was caught in Russia using a face recognition system. The technology allows checking up to 20 people per second through cameras. Earlier, the system, created by Russian engineers, was recognized as the best in its field by US intelligence.
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Alexander Bogdanov