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

[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...

'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.

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.

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.