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IBM Used NYPD Surveillance Footage To Develop Technology That Lets Police Search by Skin Color (theintercept.com)
Three months after the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that Amazon provided facial recognition technology to local law enforcement, a new report by The Intercept says that IBM collaborated with the New York City Police Department to develop a system that allowed officials to search for people by skin color, hair color, gender, age, and various facial features. VentureBeat: The Intercept and the National Institute's nonprofit Investigative Fund, citing "confidential corporate documents" and interviews with engineers involved with the project, write that IBM began developing the analytics platform roughly 10 years ago in partnership with New York's Lower Manhattan Security Initiative counterterrorist center, after an earlier experiment with the city of Chicago. Using "thousands" of photographs from roughly 50 cameras provided by the NYPD, its computer vision system learned from 16,000 points to identify clothing color and other bodily characteristics, in addition to potential threats like unattended packages, people entering off-limits areas, and cars speeding up against the flow of traffic.
Instead of looking for people by race in this country, we tend to identify them by skin color.
Race is not skin color; race is a collection of traits which make people from different groups appear, act, and be constructed slightly differently from those of other groups.
Since we cannot talk about race ("African-American") we identify suspects by description in the news, including skin color. Here's the relevant quotation:
We are looking at one of the 16,000 point here.
Alternative Right.
You do realize that we live in a society where news organizations are criticized for including race in descriptions of police suspects?