Boston Police Chief: Facial Recognition Tech Didn't Help Find Bombing Suspects

SternisheFan writes "ArsTechnica reports: 'While the whole country is relieved that this past week's Boston Marathon bombing ordeal and subsequent lockdown of the city is finally over, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis told the Washington Post that the department's facial recognition system "did not identify" the two bombing suspects. "The technology came up empty even though both Tsarnaevs' images exist in official databases: Dzhokhar had a Massachusetts driver's license; the brothers had legally immigrated; and Tamerlan had been the subject of some FBI investigation," the Post reported on Saturday. Facial recognition systems can have limited utility when a grainy, low-resolution image captured at a distance from a cellphone camera or surveillance video is compared with a known, high-quality image. Meanwhile, the FBI is expected to release a large-scale facial recognition apparatus "next year for members of the Western Identification Network, a consortium of police agencies in California and eight other Western states," according to the San Jose Mercury News. Still, video surveillance did prove extremely useful in pinpointing the suspects.'"

Comments

Re:Wasn't It As Much Individual Photog & ID?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

We should petition the whitehouse to include all the victims of the bombing without health insurance to buy into medicare/medicaid or federal employees health insurace scheme. The premia to join may be paid from the general accident victims compensation fund or through donations.

BTW if we have a single payer health insurance system, this would not even be an issue.

Re:Wasn't It As Much Individual Photog & ID?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

If Dzhokhar is deemed an enemy combatant, all the victims would lose their health insurance coverage. Most insurance does not cover Acts of War. When Bush declared 9/11 attacks as an act of war in his original speech, insurance companies invoked the exception and refused to pay WTC building insurance. Then they claimed both plane crashes actually constitute a "single instance" and reduced the claims by half. So don't put anything past our vaunted private health insurance companies.

Health insurance will not work in a free market. Insurance works only when the claimants and the insurer does not know who will file a claim and whose policies will expire without any claims. You don't know when/if your house will burn down or your car will be totaled. Nor do insurance companies. This model will work in free market.

In health care, diabetics, heart disease patients, cancer surviors, transplant recipients know how much they are going claim for sure. So does the insurer. Free market will force companies to refuse to insure them. People without chronic condition will refuse to buy policies.

For health care, single payer is the only system that will work. The savings from paperwork and preventive treatment will be enough to pay for the people currently without insurance and to contain the growth of health care costs.