Tampa Police Give Up On Face Recognition Cameras

Saint Aardvark writes "The city of Tampa has given up on their face-recognition system attached to street surveillance cameras."

Comments

Doesn't work

[JohnGrahamCumming]

If you ignore the privacy worries for a minute the most interesting thing
in this story is that the system didn't work. It didn't work in Tampa,
it didn't work in Pinellas County and it isn't working in Virgina Beach.

So you've got a dud system that's wasting police time. In Tampa they had
a full time officer using the system who could have been out on the streets
in the community that he is trying to protect understanding and interacting
with that community. If you talk to police officers, reporters, or social
workers I think you'd find that they value highly local knowledge in doing
their jobs, not all seeing all knowing eyes in the sky.

John.

Re:Doesn't work

[Azghoul]

And that's about all that has to be said about the project, though we'll get plenty of people complaining about the privacy concerns.

What's more interesting to me than the fact that it doesn't work is that the guys interviewed (policemen, IIRC) didn't know WHY it didn't work.

And they didn't waste entirely too much money, the company gave it up for a free trial. I wouldn't want to be working for that company any more though. :)

Re:Doesn't work

[0123456]

"I wouldn't want to be working for that company any more though. :)"

Why? Just because it doesn't work, that doesn't mean they can't get the government to mandate its installation in all public places to catch "terrorists". That's the great thing about government contracts: it's not whether it works, it's who you know with their face in the pork trough...

Re:Doesn't work

[0123456]

"Well, that's particularly cynical."

No, it's realistic. Just look at something like the Osprey, which the US military didn't want, which doesn't really work, and which has killed quite a few people in crashes, but Congress kept forcing funding onto the military for because it kept the pork going to their mates.

If they know the right people they will get the contracts whether or not it works: there's a huge amount of pork available for "anti-terror" projects at the moment, so they merely need to grease the right palms to get their share. Not working is irrelevant when politicos are involved.

Re:Doesn't work

[esper]

that's about all that has to be said about the project, though we'll get plenty of people complaining about the privacy concerns.

As well we should, for two reasons:

1. The cameras are still in place (and, I believe, in operation). I prefer not to be on camera without my consent, even if there isn't a computer trying to match my face against a criminal database.
   
   
2. If the only reason they retired it was because it doesn't work, then they're likely to try it again once the technology has gotten a bit better. It's not dead for good.
   

Not surprising

[Wierd Willy]

These systems will never work untill they can figure out a way to store such information as faces and other physical attributes holographically. 2D photography won't ever do it accurately enough to make the system functional.

Re:Not surprising

[tiled_rainbows]

That doesn't make sense. I can recognise a particular face from a 2D photograph. Therefore it must be possible, just difficult.

Shocking....

[moehoward]

Or not. It didn't work. No duh. Did anyone really think it would? I always got the idea of the guy selling these was like the monorail salesman in the Simpsons.

I'm completely amazed that the general public has become conditioned to tolerate this crap from law enforcement. Yes, it's nice that it's gone now, but we all know it will be back. And furthermore, the cameras themselves are still there!!! I mean, come on!! We should be outraged enough that the cameras are there, let alone the facial recognition.

Is civil disobedience dead or has civil disobedience become outlawed? What sort of legal/semi-legal countermeasures can be taken against surveillence cameras set up in public places? I'd love to have some sort of laser pointer that I can point at cameras in public areas to break them.

'the closed-circuit cameras will remain'

[Chip Salzenberg]

... with more effective pattern matching software watching it: human cops. I think that's a better deterrent to crime than the flaky software they've given up on.

It broke man.

[secondsun]

Police are at a loss to explain why the software wasn't effective, since it seemed to work fine in controlled testing, Guidara said.

If I were selling you a million dollar system it would work when I showed it off too.

Well, DUH...

[Hayzeus]

Police are at a loss to explain why the software wasn't effective, since it seemed to work fine in controlled testing, Guidara said.

This has been a MAJORLY over-hyped technology. Facial recognition isn't so hard, but the attentional mechanisms required to pick faces out of a crowd reliably under varying lighting conditions are still iffy at best. Most still seem to rely on skin color detection to pick out candidate areas of a scene, and, frankly, that method is still pretty dicey when used out in the real world.

Advertisments

[Pompatus]

Virginia Beach, Va., installed the software on closed-circuit cameras along the city's boardwalk last summer. While it has never produced a hit or an arrest, police spokesman Sgt. Max Hayden said it performed well in controlled tests and may be a deterrent to criminals. Signs along the boardwalk inform visitors of its use.

This reminds me of a DUI checkpoint I saw a couple of months ago. They had not one, but TWO signs 6 and 4 blocks, respectively, that said, "DUI checkpoint ahead". There were plenty of opportunities to turn down another street and avoid it altogether.

Does it really take that much intelligence for a criminal to avoid an area where he/she might get caught? While one might be so drunk as to not be able to read the signs, I think law inforcement in these circumstances is being as stupid as these criminals. Maybe it's that think like your enemy strategy.

Not a victory

[tundog]

My first reaction was, did they drop it because of community pressure or because it was ineffective?

But after two years, it yielded no positive identifications and no arrests

Unfortunatly, this is not a victory. When the technology is ready, it will be back.

Re:What's wrong with CCTV?

[GigsVT]

Rather than have dozens of police officers wandering about the streets more-or-less aimlessly, a smaller number can be directed to trouble spots very quickly.

The logical extension is cameras in homes. Get robbed? No problem, the police have all your video on file, and can just pull up the footage to see who broke into your home.

Or maybe there are pesky political demonstrators marching down the street, interrupting traffic. With the cameras in place, it will be easy to convict them for something to shut them up for a while.

It's not as much what their doing now, it's that the same arguments for what they are doing now can be used to justify real loss of freedom.

NPR: 1) No tax dollars; 2) No (?) false positives

[dpbsmith]

According to a radio report on NPR, Tampa did not spend money directly on the system. The surveillance cameras were already in place (and will remain in place) and Identix provided the software on some kind of free-trial or beta basis. Of course, I'm sure a great deal of police time = money was wasted on training, etc.

The reporter discussed the issue of false positives with the interviewee, in a somewhat vague way. The reporter said, sensibly enough, something like "Isn't the problem that if you require too many measurements to match you don't get identifications, and that if you only require a few you get false positives?" The interviewee concurred. I got the impression that the police department might have insisted that the system be tuned to a level where they were not wasting time on false positives, and at that level there were simply no matches.

The reporter also asked (also sensibly) whether the apparent lack of success could have been because the system's installation was widely publicized and the bad guys knew better than to show up in Ybor City. Interestingly enough, the interviewee said something like "If I believed that, it would be a great thing and I'd want to keep the system in place forever." I was, however, left with the distinct impression that the interviewee did NOT believe that.