Police departments are using AI to review bodycam footage, and police unions are not happy about it

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to Technology@lemmy.world – 314 points –
Police departments are using AI to review bodycam footage, and police unions are not happy about it
techspot.com
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Happy or unhappy I feel like body cam footage is too important a form of evidence to have reviewed by AI

AI can't be the last word in what gets marked for misconduct etc., however using it as a screening tool for potentially problematic moments in a law enforcement officer's encounters would be useful. It's an enormous task to screen through those hours upon hours of video and probably prohibitively expensive for humans to work through.

Need to be certain the false negative rate is near zero though, or important events could be missed, and with AI its nearly impossible to say that with certainty.

Important events are already being missed.

Yep we have countless stories from all over the place of people trying to get help with crimes that got no help from the police. Over and over I've heard people describe how they were robbed and the police don't put any effort towards catching the perpetrators or returning the property. And that's far from the worst of it.

I mean, that's because there's usually very little evidence to go on after a robbery, unless you have security cameras.

Most PDs don't even have the resources to process evidence from things like murders and rapes, so robbery isn't super high on their priority list.

so we should just drop the good in pursuit of perfect?

ai is just an additional tool to be applied based on its efficacy. the better the tooling gets, the more we can trust its results. but no one...

no one

is expecting ai to be perfect, and to be trusted 100%.

Maybe if it's just being used to flag potential areas of interest for review by a human? I'm open to the idea as long as there's definite accountability and care.

Which, returning to the real world, we know is a fat chance.

It's just flagging for human review. The dataset is too large and it can be made more objective than human review. As soon as I hear anything upsets police unions, I know it's gotta be good. Support this.

One thing AI is generally pretty good at is identifying what is in a video. So at the very least you don't have to waste money paying someone to watch 100s of hours of videos of donuts.

Is this the kind of thing anyone could be happy about?

Cops reviewing themselves, we know how that works out.

  1. Cops being reviewed by shitty AI.
  2. ???
  3. ???
  4. wtf

Then again, when the police union doesn't like something, makes me wonder what it's exposing about them...

Absolutely, anything the police union is against is by default a good thing for actual humans.