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Taser Will Use Police Body Camera Videos 'To Anticipate Criminal Activity' (theintercept.com)
Presto Vivace quotes a report from The Intercept: With an estimated one-third of departments using body cameras, police officers have been generating millions of hours of video footage. Taser stores terabytes of such video on Evidence.com, in private servers to which police agencies must continuously subscribe for a monthly fee. Data from these recordings is rarely analyzed for investigative purposes, though, and Taser -- which recently rebranded itself as a technology company and renamed itself "Axon" -- is hoping to change that. Taser has started to get into the business of making sense of its enormous archive of video footage by building an in-house "AI team." In February, the company acquired two computer vision startups, Dextro and Fossil Group Inc. Taser says the companies will allow agencies to automatically redact faces to protect privacy, extract important information, and detect emotions and objects -- all without human intervention. This will free officers from the grunt work of manually writing reports and tagging videos, a Taser spokesperson wrote in an email. "Our prediction for the next few years is that the process of doing paperwork by hand will begin to disappear from the world of law enforcement, along with many other tedious manual tasks." Analytics will also allow departments to observe historical patterns in behavior for officer training, the spokesperson added. "Police departments are now sitting on a vast trove of body-worn footage that gives them insight for the first time into which interactions with the public have been positive versus negative, and how individuals' actions led to it." But looking to the past is just the beginning: Taser is betting that its artificial intelligence tools might be useful not just to determine what happened, but to anticipate what might happen in the future.
This will be great - just like precrime from Minority Report. Also software will be able to replace suspect face with a scary killer face and yelling "I will kill you!" to protect police integrity.
Stop resisting! Stop resisting! Stop resisting! Stop resisting!
"But officer, I'm pulled over with the engine off and my hands are on the steering wheel while my seat belt is still on."
"Forget that! My computer says you will attack me with a knife in under 30 seconds! Stop, resisting!"
"But officer."
Zap.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
>"Why should the public be worried about the privacy & freedom of rapists, robbers and the like?"
Do you think these systems will be recording only rapists, robbers and the like? I suspect that at 90+% of the police interaction with the public results in no ticket, 98+% results in no arrest, and 99.5% in no charges (yep, I made up those numbers, but don't they sound reasonable?). There are a lot of innocent, normal people that will be caught up in this new web of surveillance. I don't think the bodycams are going to just erase everything that didn't result in a negative or law-breaking interaction. And even if that is what was claimed, how would we really know it is true?