> As a way around the constitutional requirement that they get warrants to search houses, the police were claiming that they were simply walking down the hallway when they looked in the window of our client’s apartment and saw him weighing and packaging cocaine in plain view. They also claimed that he was doing this with his apartment door open, so they hadn’t needed a forced entry.
> Our client didn’t deny he was packaging cocaine at his kitchen table, but he insisted that he was not doing it brazenly in the open; that not only had he covered his windows with taped-up sheets and garbage bags, but he had closed and locked his door, as you might expect for someone engaged in illegal activities. We went to the CHA management offices, where they had records of giving Deuce citations for repeatedly covering up windows. We also talked to the maintenance man who had been assigned to repair Deuce’s door after his arrest. The maintenance crew had taken pictures that clearly showed damage to the doorjamb, backing up Deuce’s claim that the door had been kicked in.
> We proved that the search and arrest were done in violation of the Constitution, and so the evidence collected during the arrest could not be used at trial. The charges had to be dropped.
TLDR: our client was guilty as sin. He admitted it. He was caught red-handed. He still got off scot-free.
Not arguing against any of the above. But this example hilariously contradicts the claim that "the system is stacked against the accused"
> But this example hilariously contradicts the claim that "the system is stacked against the accused"
What do you think is more likely: cops fudging facts on reports super frequently because it works, or PDs and their shared investigator having time to run down every report for each of their clients and courts accepting the findings?
> But this example hilariously contradicts the claim that "the system is stacked against the accused"
How does it contradict that? It sounds like you're saying "The system is, in fact, stacked in favour of the accused", but I'm not seeing that here.
In principle, the system _should_ be stacked in favour of the accused - it's a high bar to prove beyond reasonable doubt that a crime occurred, using only legally obtained evidence. But the examples from the article seem to suggest that in most cases, police and prosecutors have it much easier than that.
The reason the USA has an unusual system of letting the guilty criminal walk free due to police misconduct is that there was no other punishment that worked to reign in the behavior.
In a perfect system the police would be punished, either civilly or criminally, for their wrongdoing, but a prosecutor will almost never bring a case against a cop who has brought them juicy evidence. It would be career suicide. So here we are.
It does not seem to work to reign bad cops behavior. What it somehow achieved instead is that it is impossible to punish cops unless they are super duper blatant.
> They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.
Our value isn't predicated on our utility. The simple fact that we are sentient beings, capable of joy and suffering, gives us value. This is why we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled - we value them regardless of any practical utility we may derive from them.
If you go through life believing that your value depends on your practical utility, then things like AI are an incredibly scary existential threat. But denial is not a healthy way to cope with this threat. The solution is to recognize the value inherent in us as humans, and to demand public policies that reflect this fact.
A view that is not shared always by LLM cheerleaders. Part of Sam Altman's defence of the environmental impact of AI is that it is less than that of a human life.
"He said it was unreasonable to focus on "how much energy it takes to train an AI model, relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query."
"It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart," he said. "And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you."
It took a 100 billion people and their knowledge,experience to generate the data to train an AI. So that cost also comes under the environmental costs to build his version of AI.
unless he plans to freeze the training data at this point and use that for another billion years, the cost of building AI will always be more than the cost of humanity.
It's odd that whenever someone discovers a way to generate value from public noise, costs already paid, that they feel like they are being stolen from even though PPP for the average person will rise due to AI, not fall.
I think it's a little disingenuous to describe the notoriously-amoral (pathologically dishonest, accused of being a sociopath) CEO of the major AI company as a mere "AI cheerleader". He's not exactly a central example of the category.
Altman is closer to a storybook evil CEO than he is to an average "AI cheerleader".
"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing." - Oscar Wilde
Or one I prefer, though unattributed: "If the only lens through which you can view life is value in currency, that which is priceless becomes worthless."
> The simple fact that we are sentient beings, capable of joy and suffering, gives us value.
People will understandably ask, what is the actual value of being capable of joy and suffering?
I frame it another way. There is value in affording all beings dignity, respect, and the opportunity to thrive. The question of our individual value as a being is undignified. People can be more or less valuable to a particular effort, but there should be no question about their worth as a person. It should not be a part of how we understand people and ourselves.
It is a healthy conclusion that your value doesn't depend on your practical utility, because that will come and go and is sometimes beyond your control. Your value isn't a question at all.
There's no value in life, but life should be allowed to exist. Who's to say otherwise?
The lifeless dust and rock of the moon is an simpler value proposition to quantify than the messy intrinsic value of overlapping, ever-changing life here on Earth.
Life is valuable to life. Or to say it another way, there is no concept of value beyond the reckoning of living things, even the value of dust and rock on the moon.
Every year half a million children die of diarrhea. There are so, so many people in the world, who are capable of joy and suffering, who "we" don't care much at all. However I have a feeling that "we" might be joining that group eventually.
Still, it’s vastly fewer now relative to the total number of children born than any previous time in human history. It could be even fewer had birth rates begin to drop instantly as a response to child mortality dropping dramatically even in most developing countries, rather than with a few-generation delay.
Yea, and I will take it a step further; it is really easy to start to worry about the “worth of a human life” when it’s yours. When we are in the position to not care about the worth of a human for our gain(such as children working to make iPhones for us to use cheaper) we call it economics.
But our modern day capitalist hellscape has made it extremely clear that if you aren't capable of providing value for shareholders, your life literally has no value. That's the reason the US government keeps cutting welfare programs, why union suppression exists.
The fact of the matter is that unless you are producing value for shareholders, you don't get to participate in society and are left to starve to death. No amount of flowery language is going to feed and house the unemployed. And we are running full speed into a situation with the explicit and overt goal of cresting as many unemployed people as possible while simultaneously ensuring that there are no resources or help offered to those unemployed people.
Flowery language will cover up the starving bodies in the streets the same way a can of febreeze will cover up a landfill. This is an enormous problem and if we don't fix it, people will die. Whether or not a human has intrinsic moral value by simply existing, we require money to survive in this society. A human life may be a mystical beautiful and valuable concept, but our society has determined that if you don't have money, you literally do not deserve to live.
That's what these students are so angry about. They're being pushed into a world that refuses to employ them and which delivers a death sentence for the crime of unemployment.
You're conflating society with the white collar job at hand. Yes, if you don't provide value for shareholders, your life is worthless _to that company_. The company is in the business of making money. The businesses goals are a microcosm; a small subset of society. There are many other ways to live (and live well, I might add).
Our joy and suffering depends on our connection with other people, and being useful to other people has since the dawn of humanity been one of the ways we connect.
Our joy and suffering depends on our ability to fulfil our basic needs like shelter and food, and in current socioeconomic environment that ability intimately depends on the ability to create wealth, which in turn depends on our ability to provide value to others.
I can see both being undermined. What public policies reflecting this do you envision?
Yes it is. If human life was inherently valuable then the concept of poverty wouldn't exist because the entity that sees it as valuable would be willing to spend resources on maintaining it.
> The solution is to recognize the value inherent in us as humans, and to demand public policies that reflect this fact.
Most social programs keep expanding until they become unsustainably expensive. You can't just make a law "everyone gets free money" and expect this to have no negative consequences.
>If human life was inherently valuable then the concept of poverty wouldn't exist
This only proves that injustice exists. Surprise: injustice still exists.
I'm hoping that you're still young and primarily motivated by survival, which can lure you into this cold world view. I think the reality is an inversion of that old "if you're not liberal at 20 you have no heart, but if you're not conservative by 30 you have no brain" chestnut.
Hopefully once you've made it past the raw basics of survival and the feelings of a dog-eat-dog world, you can look back and realize that compassionate people helped you over and over throughout your life, maybe without you even realizing it at the time. The next step is to realize that you can extend that same compassion to others.
If human lives weren't inherently valuable, the concept of charity wouldn't exist. Where does that leave us? I think probably the line of argument doesn't work in either direction.
Likewise, most of the time you don't have social programs, somebody will introduce social programs. You can't just say "no social programs" and expect this to have no positive consequences... okay this is falling apart a bit, but the point is, what makes 'not expanding UBI' so much harder than 'not introducing UBI'? If you can convince people that introducing UBI will lead to expanding UBI and that that is bad, what's stopping you from just convincing them of the latter?
For the past 500 years humans were existing with their labor value in the very center.
Do you expect the enlightenment project to be resumed and finished in a year? Or do you imply some religion-based worldview where the value is derived from God, flesh, nature?
No sir, grim times are coming. We can only hope that the current AI wave bites more than it can swallow.
"Value" is a word with many meanings. Your value as a human or a living being may be very different from your value to your employer or your value to the taxman or anywhere else.
It is very easy to get lost in between them, especially when listening to a good speaker who can flitter between those meanings at will.
What is worse is that those values interact. We indeed we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled, but only up to a point, and there is a reasonable discussion how exactly should countries divide their limited resources between vulnerable groups, including families with young kids. In that context, the future economic and societal value of a 5 y.o. vs. a 85 y.o. inevitably creeps up.
>If you go through life believing that your value depends on your practical utility
My value definitely depends on my practical utility. Everyone is capable of joy and suffering. A chicken is capable of joy and suffering.
Tell me this: in a hypothetical situation where you are going to end up on an uninhabited island and you can choose one person to go with you, who would you peek? An elderly disabled one or a person that has necessary skills to survive? Maybe utility matters?
I don't think that's quite right, unless you personally value joy for its own sake. I value knowledge, and joy is useful to creating knowledge, and suffering is harmful to it. But I don't want to have some futile joy, and I don't need to avoid some irrelevant suffering.
Otherwise you get effects like;
* Just take drugs, feel meaningless "joy" because that's what you value,
* Don't do anything less "joyful" even though it's more meaningful.
I'll admit that knowledge isn't practical, and you can't always identify when you're creating it, and a lot of people don't think in these terms and there's a lot of intuition involved, along with societal mores about caring for people which help the growth of knowledge as general rules without getting all bean-counting about it. But I think it matters that hedonism is an incoherent motivation and that creating knowledge is a far clearer one (and hedonism tends to turn into creating knowledge, anyway, if you like meaning). Hedonism, utilitarianism, same difference.
> Otherwise you get effects like;
> * Just take drugs, feel meaningless "joy" because that's what you value,
> * Don't do anything less "joyful" even though it's more meaningful.
These are entirely valid positions to take though. Obtaining knowledge for knowledge's sake isn't objectively more meaningful, even if it may be subjectively more valuable to you.
You could make the point that teaching, and thus furthering the collective knowledge of our species, may be somewhat objectively meaningful, because you impact the trajectory of humanity. But unless you draw joy from that specific fact alone, the joy from creating knowledge is just as selfish as taking drugs to attain a state of bliss (which, again, I don't oppose either.)
Also, I'd even challenge the notion that knowledge alone, at its face value, automatically equates to a benefit for humanity. Harari has made that point far more eloquently than I in Nexus.
Oh, the Sapiens guy. I read Sapiens, thought it was OK, then other people picked holes in it and persuaded me that it was worse than that. But I suppose that doesn't preclude this Nexus book being good.
But anyway I agree: motivations are arbitrary. Why you even got to do a thing? Just sit and be sessile and die. (This is not a personal attack, or recommended.)
I rely heavily on an assumption that we do all have more or less the same set of values - but this might be cultural, not biological: it's hard to get inside the head of, say, Aztecs, with whatever strange non-modern values they had.
I also make an assumption about knowledge being central among those values, although it's definitely not all that, and some people will say they don't even consider it. But I think they are doing anyway, if they live in the world as we know it.
Side comment: you've made "joy" separate from "bliss" and "meaning" separate from "knowledge", and then there's some undefined "benefit for humanity" that might not be any of those things, along with the apparent value of "impacting the trajectory of humanity" - is that good, just impacting it, in any non-specific way? lol terminology.
I think you missed my point. The distinction I made in terminology was on purpose: I used "joy" to describe the inherent motivation for trying to accomplish something, and "bliss" for the state some may try to reach by using drugs.
And I also made a distinction between knowledge and meaning, which you sort of seem to imply is a universally shared value, while I seriously doubt that is the case. There are many ways to derive meaning from existence that do not involve amassing knowledge - even just passively profiting off of the knowledge of others, but taking no curiosity in that at all.
And as you pointed out, I carefully phrased impacting the trajectory of humanity to avoid implying any moral judgement. People have many reasons for wanting to leave something behind that outlasts them, which may be good or bad or anything in between.
Obviously you'd want to name "joy" as a separate thing, to propose it as the thing we're motivated to do, but the problem is that you didn't describe it. So now I'm at: the thing we're motivated to do is the thing we're motivated to do, and it's not whatever I say it is, but apart from that you haven't told me anything about it. Of course I'm open to some pluralism, like it can be a string bag of mixed motivations, but I do think the motivations in our culture all agree with creating knowledge, and become vacuous without that element. What is "gain", "pleasure", etc., without meaning? (I don't know what you mean by meaning. I mean the process of explaining and learning and creating ideas.) Without it those are mechanical processes of the "number go up" type. Yes, I am skeptical that anything of that kind is anybody's deep motivation, though it may be a superficial one.
Why are you trying to avoid morality? That seems like a good way to never find out anything important, since importance is a moral judgement.
> the thing we're motivated to do is the thing we're motivated to do, and it's not whatever I say it is, but apart from that you haven't told me anything about it.
That’s just what I mean: I oppose your notion of a universally shared motivation of deriving meaning from creating knowledge. I don’t have an alternative to offer, because I believe no such objective motivation exists. Instead, it occurs to me you project your own belief system onto humanity (or at least your society) as a whole.
Yes, our world might be shaped most dramatically by those with a desire to create knowledge, but that still doesn’t support the generalisation that humans universally consider the creation of knowledge as a way to give their life meaning.
> Why are you trying to avoid morality?
I try to avoid bringing it into the question of what is and what isn’t a valid motivation for a continued existence, because that is one of the most fundamentally subjective aspects of being a sentient creature. Who am I to make a judgement?
....I think it's a fairly widespread view to value joy for its own sake. In fact, I would say that's pretty much how normal people would say they view joy.
So normal people don't make sense, what else is new.
The problem here is that joy-in-itself isn't anything. Say you're a huge hedonist, and you try to maximize your pleasure. Maybe you start with some notion involving a speedboat and cocaine. Then you might ask, how can you maximize your pleasure even more? That means you have to ask why you like things. You like things for reasons, and reasons have meaning, and meaning is knowledge. So maybe your next step is to add music or something. But in doing this your activity isn't just having pleasure, it's finding things out. The more you work at maximizing pleasure, the more you're finding things out, and the less of a cliche the things you enjoy are, and pleasure-in-itself becomes less real, because it never really meant anything. The alternate path is to stick closely to the cliches, ride around coked-up on your speedboat forever, and fail to really have a good time because mechanical behavior isn't genuinely enjoyable and trying to maximise pleasure is self-defeating.
Your examples make it clear that you do not understand normal people in the slightest. And when I say "normal" here, I'm not talking about the Blazing Saddles-style "salt of the earth; you know, morons." I mean roughly the middle 50-60% (by width) of the bell curve. The vast majority of humanity.
Normal people don't self-reflect, realize they like joy, and then try to maximize this with speedboats and cocaine. If they realize they like joy and want to maximize it, they do things like spend more time with their families.
THIS is going to be the limitation of capitalism. Capitalism isn't compassionate. It's a really good economic framework though, so it will be interesting how that's reconciled in the coming years
Money and monetary systems aren't compassionate -- people are.
Historically (in the USA), capitalism was paired with charity and supporting those around you (primarily for religious reasons).
One of the greatest downsides of the welfare system is that people don't give the money to others themselves (it's instead stripped from them and doled out without their input). They don't get to experience the good feelings that come from helping another person (only negative feelings about the government taking their money).
This removes the habits of practicing selflessness and it's positive feedback loop. As a result, we get all the downsides of capitalism with a trained selfish cohort who have no charitable feelings to counterbalance things.
There's also the other side. The beneficiaries of the system never feel the need to be grateful, as the money is legally theirs. So you end up with selfish/uncharitable on one side and ungrateful/envious on the other.
What do you win at the end of the race? I've never heard it concisely put. 'Dominance' is the word that comes to my mind, but I don't want to put words in your mouth and don't really know why that would inherently be a valuable trophy, so that's probably not what you were thinking of, right?
You are right. I'm not saying I like the way things are trending. But I also think setting up our children means making sure they're prepared for the future. I don't think AI will ever replace the importance of education.
Why should we care about that? Even if you wanted to argue our individual fates are tied to our country's, we don't all live in the same country, so how, actually, could we all care? Are you really convinced its so zero sum like this?
We collectively spend decades and decades creating a sophisticated global capitalism, huge networks and infrastructures of trade and travel, just to find ourselves in some dark forest-esque race with everyone else anyway? Is this really consistent to you? What was the point of anything in the last, like 40 years to you if we just need to act like we are still in a cold war, except this time its a war with everyone?
"Other countries" means China here, I think. China got a little on board with the global capitalism (and lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty along the way, if we're looking for the point), but never really embraced Liberalism and so ideally isn't the one aligning superintelligence. It would be lousy if Russia or North Korea or Somalia was in that position and it would be fine if the UK or Denmark or Brazil or Ghana was, but none of that matters because none of them will be in that position. Only the US and China are playing the game.
If this speculated intelligence is so "super" why would it matter what its host country's commitments are? I would hope it would at least be intelligent enough to sort things out there? How can something be so potentially threatening, so "super," but also be like a baby, where we need to worry how its raised? Its super intelligent about everything except ideology? That doesn't really sound like (super)intelligence to me..
But ok, even granting that framing, if the issue is China's placement on the spectrum of "liberal", what would it take for them to be the good enough guys here?
I think it's more of a prestige discussion. Who leads, who follows, between countries. Not whose super intelligence is better. Who got their first, and how are they using it?
A supervillain is nevertheless super. Intelligence doesn't correlate with morality- most probably there doesn't exist a 'true ideology' that can be solved for in absolute terms. Do you imagine a superintelligence could calculate how beauty 'ought to' be traded off against truth?
When I say China is a bad choice because it's not as liberal as ~the west, I do imagine a reader in China thinking the opposite. I don't think they're dumb and I don't think they've been duped; they have a coherent ideology that fits their values. I just don't want it to stomp out mine.
Maybe I'm wrong and you can solve for morality or at least the meta-morality of Liberalism/pluralism where you permit various moralities to coexist. Hopefully so. Maybe the value system in China is closer to mine than I imagine and it's just operating under different constraints. But I don't want to gamble on that when winning is within reach and is a guarantee given alignment to any human values is achieved at all.
How many times have you written a boring CRUD endpoint that returns a list of results?
Half the stuff I lose time on is the boring boilerplate code (despite using frameworks). Now I can focus on the fun stuff like determining an optimal algorithm or even getting the LLM to walk me through using kubectl on the terminal
Now I know some kubectl commands off by heart, which I didn't before.
Kind of, really I'm saying that I've seen a lot of deep-stage AI addicts who seem much more impressionable and much less capable of independent thought than they were before they started using.
There is a problem with the thesis that consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon. It implies that someone writing the "wrong" sequence of 0s and 1s, by hand, on a completely private journal, has committed a moral crime on par with slavery and genocide.
People talk about AI sycophancy, but there are plenty of human sycophants as well. If you're an extremely rich/powerful person, it is very easy to inadvertently surround yourself with sycophants who tell you how amazing and ground-breaking all your ideas are. I wonder if this is the reason people like Musk engage in such bizarre behavior and radical personality shifts over the past decade
> but there are plenty of human sycophants as well
That's besides the point. This is about how AI induces psychosis and mental problems on scale. Also let's stop this constant humans-vs-ai false dichotomy - it will never be the same, no matter how much the ai boosters yearn for it!
That would be a false equivalence not a false dichotomy. You believe they are different and you're annoyed that people are treating them like the same.
Additionally it isn't beside the point. The poster is pointing out the ways which people respond to sycophancy. Saying there are similarities between how they respond to sycophancy from AI and sycophancy from real people.
This logic absolutely should apply to all unions, including both police and teachers unions. You can find equally disgusting anecdotes of bad teachers who are protected by their unions, with students paying the price. You can tell a lot about whether someone has impartial judgement by seeing whether they consistently support/oppose both
Who exactly has a vested interest in starting a worldwide conspiracy to ban social media for kids?
FWIW as an adult in my 30s, social media has caused me far greater harm than even binge drinking. I can't even imagine growing up as a teenager under the social media microscope
Now children cannot form solidarity and exit abusive situations as easily. They are not exposed to diverse viewpoints or cultures. They cannot embarrass themselves and learn online social etiquette. They cannot engage with much of the online culture at all really.
It's sinister and patronizing, born from fear and ignorance, nothing else.
Identifying and tracking everyone can't be a "byproduct" when it's already being done for years before hand, by the very businesses who are being directly prevented from accessing certain users by these new laws you're objecting to. Before Facebook the general advice was "do not post your real name on the internet ever", Facebook said basically "that doesn't work for [our advertisers?], we will ban you for anything other than your real name, or what we think real names look like": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_cont...
For the last few years there have been 400-1600+ "trusted partners" on every website already tracking everyone. In the US, recent news is the FBI is buying that info from the private sector without a warrant: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5752369/ice-surveillanc...
Back in 2016, the UK's Investigatory Powers Act (one of two reasons I moved out of the UK) requires ISPs record domain names for all user browsing nationwide and store them for a year, and will provide it without a warrant to a long list of organisations including the Welsh Ambulance Services National Health Service Trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016#...
If you want to end surveillance, great. That requires at a minimum banning all tracking cookies etc., and we can see from the collective reaction to GDPR (consent popups instead of not tracking people) how hard the real surveillance industry has been fighting against all that.
Like you observed the damage of social media is not unique to children. So a more sensible legislation would serve to help everybody from the harm of social media, not just children.
Second, age verification systems have a lot to benefit from a government contract.
Third, social media and ad companies would for sure prefer a blanket ban on children rather then a more careful legislation which e.g. ban targeted advertising, or further regulates social media from harmful patterns.
Who exactly has a vested interest in starting a worldwide conspiracy to [ think of the children ] in order to push [ nefarious measure ]? Difficult question that.
You should actually try saying something instead of vaguely insinuating something.
Like, I legitimately am trying to understand what you're saying but it's frustratingly vague. I feel like you're wasting my time with your attempt to seem like you know more than everyone else.
I did say something. "Think of the children" became a cliche because of how commonly it crops up in politics. At this point it's far more common to see it attached to nefarious measures as opposed to those with accurate statements of intent.
The bad faith rhetoric on your part is unwelcome and explicitly against the rules here ... I say to the account from 2014. Given you've been around awhile assuming you were legitimately frustrated by my comment is it possible you've misunderstood? I was quoting the parent in a manner intended to make the pattern of engagement obvious. A fill in the blank that it should be immediately apparent broadly fits past discourse on a wide array of topics.
Basically any time you can summarize an argument as "think of the children" you should immediately become maximally skeptical of the overall situation. The answer to my "difficult question" is pretty much everyone based on historical precedent.
> The bad faith rhetoric on your part is unwelcome and explicitly against the rules here .
Asking for clarification is a hallmark of good faith discussion. More of that and less snark is healthy.
Yes there are side effects. I would still vote that it's a net good as a practical solution to a number of problems. Notably the suicide rates, declines in testing, and skill development.
The eternal debate between more socially enforced control versus independence. These controls apply to caring for the young versus being used to oppress the adult. Hand waving without specific concerns, isn't going to change the minds of people that have a different take.
I think it's great that there will be plenty of data (for both sides) in the next few decades, with the patchwork adoption.
The request for clarification was not what I was referring to as bad faith rhetoric.
It seems like you're actively trying to change the subject. No one said anything about side effects and I don't think anyone was handwaving. The exchange you jumped into here was one regarding the presence of outside centralized influence on the legislative process at the international level.
The separate question of whether the initiative is of net benefit for society needs to be considered alongside potential alternatives in addition to any expected downsides. The elephant in the room is that the least invasive and most straightforward option of mandating the presence of accurate content classification headers has never been tried even though it would appear highly likely to solve the problem as I've usually seen it stated.
> According to the court documents, the Fargo detective working the case then looked at Lipps' social media accounts and Tennessee driver's license photo. In his charging document, the detective wrote that Lipps appeared to be the suspect based on facial features, body type and hairstyle and color.
> Once they were in hand, Fargo police met with him and Lipps at the Cass County jail on Dec. 19. She had already been in jail for more than five months. It was the first time police interviewed her.
How is this the fault of AI? It flagged a possible match. A live human detective confirmed it. And the criminal justice system, for reasons that have nothing to do with AI, let this woman sit in jail for 5 months before doing even interviewing her or doing any due diligence.
There's a reason why we don't let AI autonomously jail people. Instead of scapegoating an AI bogeyman, maybe we should look instead at the professional human-in-the-loop who shirked all responsibility, and a criminal justice system that thinks it is okay to jail people for 5 months before even starting to assess their guilt.
> How is this the fault of AI? It flagged a possible match. A live human detective confirmed it.
Because we're seeing the first instances of what reality looks like with AI in the hands of the average bear. Just like the excuse was "but the computer said it was correct," now we're just shifting to "but the AI said it was correct."
Don't underestimate how much authority and thinking people will delegate to machines. Not to mention the lengths they'll go to weasel out of taking responsibility for a screw up like this (saw another comment in this thread about the Chief of Police stepping down but it being framed as "retirement").
It's only recently some have come to terms with the fact that DNA evidence sometimes returns false positives. Society, and law enforcement, assumed that DNA was infallible. No one apparently wondered millions of people could be reduced to a tiny number of genetic markers apparently having no overlap.
Danish police had to redo 20.000 DNA tests with a larger set of markeres begin tested, because they jailed someone based solely on a DNA test and did consider that they might have gotten the wrong person, despite the DNA match. It's essentially a human hash collision.
Identification by AI is going to be the same, except worse, because it's frankly less scientific. Law enforcement, the judicial system and especially the public is simply to uninterested in learning the limitations of these types of systems. Even in the more civilized part of the world police would love to just have the computer tell them who to pick up and where.
There was a man arrested in Santa Clara county because his DNA was tracked to a murder scene by the paramedics that treated him before they were called to the scene of the murder. He only got away with it because the public defender realized that he was in the hospitals detox at the time of the murder.
A dude in the usa was arrested in a casino by police because the casino's facial recognition software said he had been trespassed before. He hadn't. I think there was height differences and eye colour difference. The police still arrested him, booked him. I think the prosecutors took it to trial.
> I feel like I'm going crazy with this narrative.
We're only getting warmed up. There are programmers on HN that will take the output of their favorite AI, paste it and run it. And we're supposed to be the ones that know better.
What do you think an ordinary person is going to do in the presence of something that they can not relate to anything else except for an oracle, assuming they know the term? You put anything in there and out pops this extremely polished looking document, something that looks better than whatever you would put together yourself with a bunch of information on it that contains all kinds of juicy language geared up to make you believe the payload. And it does that in a split second. It's absolutely magical to those in the know, let alone to those that are not.
They're going to fall for it, without a second thought.
And they're going to draw consequences from it that you thought could use a little skepticism. Too late now.
The “I” in “AI” stands for “intelligence”. Cops are using AI facial recognition because it is being sold to them as being smarter and better than what they are currently capable of. Why are we then surprised that they aren’t second-guessing the technology?
AI facial recognition is smarter than what they are capable of. That's not the issue. It is much faster than a human, and state-of-the-art models make fewer errors than a human (though the types of errors are not the same).
The issue is that facial recognition is just not very reliable. Not for humans and not for machines. If you look at millions of people, some of them just look incredibly similar. Yet police apparently thought that was all the evidence they will ever need. A case so watertight there's no point in even talking to the suspect
So the sane solution here is just leaving unreliable stuff to humans and reliable to machines. Especially so when human wellbeing and freedom are at the stake.
To define the line between the two, calculate the percentage of cases when mainstream CPUs return anything but integer 4 after addition of integer 2 and integer 2, and use that as the threshold to define "reliable".
Police get raises and recognition for closing cases. In general they don't care if you're guilty or not, that's someone else's problem. Same with the detective, same with the DA. The more cases they close they 'tougher they are on crime'.
If you have a broken system whose injustice is checked only by the limitations of the human elements, and you start replacing those human elements and powerscaling them, you have an unlimited downside.
Some police departments seem to actively reject candidates that have higher scores on IQ tests. Not that I think IQ test scores and actual intelligence are related but it clearly shows their intended target candidate group.
This came up a few weeks ago. I don't think it's true. This lawsuit from 26 years ago is the only example anybody has come up with. Among the problems with this claim:
* Nobody can find a police department that administers any kind of general cognitive test.
* There are large states with statewide written police aptitude tests that are imperfect but correlated to general cognitive ability, and maximizing scores on that test is the universal correct strategy.
* It's a luridly stupid policy and most municipalities aren't luridly stupid.
I think this happened like, once or twice, in one or two of the 20,000 police departments across the United States, many of which are like one goober and his sidekick (no offense to them; just, you live in gooberville, you're a goober), and now it's an Internet meme that police departments specifically hire for midwittery. Nah.
The Wonderlic might as well be an IQ test (I'm using the term "general cognitive test").
The LST isn't; it's a domain-specific occupational exam.
If you find a place that (1) uses the Wonderlic and (2) has recently (like, not all the way back in 2000) claimed there was a high-end cut-off for applicants, you'll have disproven my claim. I don't think giving general cognitive tests to prospective police officers is common; this is why there are things like the LST, the PELLETB, and the POST.
You're over-selling the minimum level of intelligence in homo sapiens.
What you're stating is your wishful thinking. Don't get me wrong. I'd also like what you say to be true. It very much is not. Quite the opposite, which is why salespeople "work".
The amount of AI bullshit Senior+ level developers just paste to me as truth is astonishing.
As soon as we start to see a pattern of shitty vibe-coded software actually harming people via defects etc. (see: therac-25), I would hope that the conversation is about structural change to mitigate risk in aggregate rather than just punitive consequences for the individual programmers who are "responsible". The latter would be a fantastically stupid response and would do little or nothing to reduce future harm.
all accountability need not be punitive, we can certainly talk about systemic guardrails. What I find disbelief in, is someone saying the Chief of Police saying "We are not going to talk about that today?" is not the biggest scandal, but the AI is.
"Among his accomplishments has been establishing the department’s Real Time Crime Center that leverages technology and data to support officers in responding more effectively to incidents," the city's release said. "Zibolski also prioritized officer wellness initiatives to strengthen mental health resources and resilience within the department. He reinstituted the Traffic Safety Team to focus on roadway safety and proactive enforcement, and ... played an active role in statewide discussions on various issues affecting law enforcement."
From the same article... He spearheaded a push to "leverage technology and data to support officers in responding more effectively to incidents", then that same technology mistakingly ruins a woman's life by passing along a hit to an officer who compared with her FB photos and said "sure, seems right".
The technology seems highly relevant here. Plus, as we've seen in the software world, when a mandate comes from the top to use the shiny new magic AI tools as much as possible, the officer may have felt pressured to make arrests using the new system they paid a bunch of money for instead of second guessing whatever it spits out.
> someone saying the Chief of Police saying "We are not going to talk about that today?" is not the biggest scandal, but the AI is.
Who is this "someone"? OP's article and the discussion here are absolutely not neglecting the human factors and general
institutional failure that made this possible. But it's also true that without these "AI" tools, it would never have happened.
Yea but this feels like when a Waymo ran over a cat, and a Human driver ran over a toddler and both got the same level of coverage in the media (actually the cat got more follow-up coverage). And I'm supposed to believe both issues are equally important.
No. That's gaslighting, and totally misplaced political activation.
What do you propose we do in the latter situation? The news isn't the value of the life that was (presumably lost). The news is the circumstances that made that loss possible. Human driver was maybe careless, or maybe didn't look. The child safety classes I took emphasized over and over again to look around your car and yard before backing your car out. This is a problem with a known solution that unfortunately still happens despite the best efforts to prevent it.
Waymo hitting a cat is obviously less tragic, but if it can hit a cat, what else can it hit? A toddler? A human? The wall of your kitchen? This is a problem that has no known solution; furthermore, it's a problem that the engineers at Waymo don't seem overly keen on solving quickly.
"This is a problem with a known solution that unfortunately still happens despite the best efforts to prevent it."
Great, let's just apply that logic to Waymo as well and call it a day (see how silly that sounds?). Waymo has engineers..so does the Department of transportation.
I'm really not sure how to respond to this because it seems like you're insinuating that the Dept of Transportation has the same level of control over ALL cars in the country as Waymo has over their cars.
You are right IMO to question why North Dakota police were able to obtain this Tennessean woman in the first place, you’d think something like that should require far more sufficient evidence than facial recognition.
But, then what good is facial recognition for? Would it have been okay for this woman’s life to have been merely invaded because she matched a facial recognition system? Maybe they can just secretly watch you so you’re not consciously aware of being investigated? Should that be our new standard, if a computer thinks you look like a suspect you can be harassed by police in a state you’ve never even been in?
I just don’t see a legitimate way for AI to empower officers here without risking these new harms. That’s why I lean towards blaming the AI tech, rather than historically intractable problems like the reality of law enforcement.
Having a facial recognition match make you a suspect and cause the police to ask you some questions doesn't seem completely unreasonable to me. Investigations can certainly begin with weak forms of evidence (like an anonymous tip), you just require a higher standard of evidence for a search warrant, surveillance, or an arrest. A facial recognition match shouldn't be probable cause for an arrest warrant, but it still might be a useful starting point for a detective looking for actual evidence.
It is absolutely not reasonable to use low-quality photos to decide someone halfway across the country with no history of even leaving their local area is 'a suspect'.
Why does not the investigator have to supply some sort of evidence that she has a history of leaving their local area rather than putting the onus on the accused? This line of argument is halfway to "guilty until proven otherwise".
You and the GP that replied to me are way overstating what it means to be a "suspect". It just means the police are investigating you and consider it a possibility you've committed the crime. On its own, is not a sufficient status to search your home, subpoena your ISP, or arrest you - all of those things require a much higher burden of evidence, and oftena third party (judge's) approval. People routinely become "suspects" on much flimsier evidence than an unreliable software match - if I call in an anonymous tip that I saw you acting suspicious near the crime scene, you will probably become a suspect.
If you'd like, you can replace the term "suspect" in my post with "person of interest", which colloquially implies a lot less suspicion but isn't practically any different in terms of how the police interacts with you.
I feel like I'm going crazy that anyone tries to suggest the AI and the producers and promulgators and apologists of AI played no part and bear none of the responsibility in this narrative.
Because the responsibility lies on the part of the criminal justice system who used the flimsy AI facial recognition evidence to arrest and hold her for months. If AI didn't exist, and this same incident happened because a human looked at a photograph of the woman and said "I think this might be the same person who committed the crime in the video", it would be insane to blame the people who invented photographs or video recording for her arrest.
The problem is in how these tools are sold to them. Not everybody can be an expert in every topic. Like in every other application area, these AI systems are promoted as being able to do about a thousand times more, and a million times more reliably, than they actually are. Of course the departments can be expected to do some due diligence and instruct their officers, but the lies by AI system suppliers is where a large part of the blame belongs. Manufacturers of cameras or CCTV systems never told the police department that the system would do their job for them.
You are exactly correct. Cops cannot be trusted. We spent a lot of time pointing that out in 2020. AI is the least of our problems with policing.
Unfortunately, a lot of people are certain it won't happen to them, and it has been practically impossible to establish any kind of accountability. It has only gotten worse since 2020.
Are we just gonna pretend the wide implementation of bodycams hasn't shown that the overwhelming majority of times the cops weren't in the wrong to a point that the same people that demanded them want them gone now?
Cops are already susceptible to confirmation bias, and for "efficiencies" they are delegating part of their job to apparently magical tools that will only increase their confirmation bias. And because it is for efficiency you can bet they won't be given extra time to validate the results.
What or who is at fault isn't either/or, it's a bunch of compounding factors.
You’re on the right track here but I don’t think it should be hand-waved away as “the least of your problems” - it’s yet another weapon that police in the USA can use against the population with impunity. They’re going to have to reckon with all of this in the coming years - cops having guns and armored cars, “qualified immunity”, the “stop resisting” workaround for brutality and now this AI
> Why are cops not treated the same way? OP is right, AI is totally irrelevant in this story.
It's absolutely absurd. The argument that AI is the problem is literally the people arguing against AI shedding responsibility to the machines. The people arguing that AI is the problem are essentially (philosophically) the same people who will say it was the AIs fault.
The thing that it most reminds me of is people trying to stop the deaths and injuries that come as a result of "swatting" by being really angry at people who "swat" and proposing the harshest punishment for it that they can come up with (or outdoes anyone else in the thread.)
The problem with swatting is that police were showing up to the houses of harmless people based on anonymous phone tips and murdering them. You guarantee swatting will work indefinitely when you indemnify the cops.
You don't need AI for injustice in the US justice system. There is literally no part of the US justice system that makes sense at all, and even in the best case scenario when the guilty are caught, tried, and punished, it is tremendously wasteful, cruel, and ass-backwards. Juries are basically the AI of the US justice system, allowing the prosecutorial and enforcement apparatus to be infinitely cruel, illogical, self-serving and incompetent. 12xFull AGI. AI couldn't do any worse.
> I feel like I'm going crazy with this narrative.
You’re going crazy because up until this exact moment you’ve never had to confront the reality that these tools, placed into the hands of the common man, are viewed as authoritative and lack any accountability or consequence for misuse.
For anyone who has been victimized by law enforcement or governments before, we’ve been warning about this shit for decades. About the lack of consequence for police brutality. The lack of consequence for LPR abuse. The lack of consequence for facial recognition failures and AI mismatches.
You need to understand that by using these systems correctly and holding yourself accountable, you are in the minority. Most people do not think that critically, and are all too happy to finger the computer when things go badly.
And until you accept that, and work to actually hold folks accountable instead of deflecting blame away from the tool, then this won’t actually change.
Do you mean hypothetically could society hold law enforcement personnel accountable for mistakes, bad judgement, flagrant criminal conduct, horrendous abuse of any and everyone? Certainly, a large scale and comprehensive restructuring of America’s law enforcement and prosecutorial system is legally possible.
However, I hold to the opinion that if you are discussing actual reality, based on decades (if not the entire period post civil war, for near certainty) of historical examples and the current “majority” position of the US electorate: there is a nearly unqualified NO. We cannot, or will not, hold law enforcement accountable for even intentional, planned, and malicious conduct in a vast majority of cases. There is practically no accountability at all, and that’s just for thoroughly proven intentional conduct. Bad judgement, alleged mistakes, etc are even less able to result in any action.
The reality of the legislation and precedent ensure it. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
It's called qualified immunity. Many support its repeal. I hope you join them, and convey the same to your local representatives and candidates. Until it is reformed few if any officers or administrators of criminal justice in the United States will ever feel any type of accountability.
Short of video evidence of blatant gun to the back of the head style homicide qualified immunity means most law enforcement officials are never held accountable for their miscarriages of justice. Criminal charges against officers are exceedingly rare. She should be able to sue this detective directly. Of course she can sue the government too, and should. But without any personal consequences for the people carrying out these acts, taxpayers will continue to bail out these practices without ever noticing. Your own government should not be a shield for a police officer who has violated you or your neighbors.
There's nothing to repeal. Qualified immunity is a doctrine that the judicial branch made up out of thin air, with no legislative backing.
But agreed, we need legislatures to write laws that expressly hold police accountable, and declare that they are not shielded from liability when things go wrong due to their own failures and negligence.
While the origins of qualified immunity are judicial, some State loved the idea so much the went and made it statutory too. Louisiana’s 2024 bill explicitly removes negligence as an exception (which is a valid method to circumvent qualified immunity based on jurisprudence at the federal and most state levels). Louisiana requires intentional violations or criminal actions to even be able to bring a claim.
> Short of video evidence of blatant gun to the back of the head style homicide qualified immunity means most law enforcement officials are never held accountable for their miscarriages of justice.
You can hold someone responsible only after they've actually fucked up. And with the way things move in the criminal justice system, that can take months to discover. Holding them responsible doesn't really fix anything, it's purely reactive.
Dude, not sure which team are you working in, but across many-many domains - corporate, business and political, people are already delegating full decision making and responsibility to AI. Unless national governments and standards institutions create and enforce ironclad AI governance laws, situations resembling what this poor granny went through are going to occur again, again and again.
There’s money to be made selling AI plausible deniability machines that allow end users to enact unethical policies while evading accountability, but only if all moral responsibility ostensibly falls on the end user and none on the dealer.
You should tell that to Angela Lipps, I'm sure she told every cop she came in contact with she had never been to Fargo. Cops have a responsibility to do their job, part of that job is listening and relying on proof. ALL those cops were either too lazy or were afraid of their superiors. This is unacceptable for the amount of power and information they have access to. We should either de-fund the police system or reform the hell out of it. BTW, where was her state representative during this fiasco?!?
The belief by a juror that law enforcement personnel, especially phrased as a belief that applies to law enforcement personnel as a generic group, is a well established basis for a challenge for cause leading to exclusion of that person from being a juror. The US jury system is build explicitly on excluding these types of belief in juries in order to ensure fairness, impartiality, and individual and case/witness specificity of “triers-of-fact”.
I could understand someone who disagrees with it, but your position would be antithetical to current and historical thought on what defines a fair jury.
True, apparently I got backspace happy when Inposted the reply on mobile. I was talking about the belief by a perspective juror that law enforcement personnel are more credible or trustworthy than others due to their status as law enforcement personnel.
This is not quite true. The rules of evidence state that law enforcement (official) testimony is more credible than civilian testimony. Officials have a wide exemption from hearsay objections, if the offfical was working at an official task at the time.
I mean, this is the USA we're talking about. Cops are given huge authority over everyone else, with poor accountability. AI just lets them pretend to be even less accountable. And by "pretend" I of course mean "get away with it".
See, AI was used to accelerate arrest and jailing, but not to follow through. It was not used to ensure her well being. Clearly this demonstrates that AI contributes to treating humans inhumanely, and demonstrably AI is not used to improve anyones quality of life. Stop making excuses for "AI not at fault here".
It's not even just incompetence, but malice. "AI says so" is going to be the perfect catch-all excuse for literally everything anyone might want to do that they shouldn't. You know how techbros love to excuse every horrifying outcome of their torment nexi with "don't blame me, the algorithm did it"? It's going to be like that, but now everyone can do it.
It's also why people start parroting the phrase "the purpose of a system is what it does". Look at where we are right now: a precipice before this becomes widely used in all forms of policing. We still have a chance to police the police's use of the AI.
The purpose of using AI to identify suspects in criminal cases is to ease the burden of manual searching for a suspect (or insert whatever the purpose of statement you want). Ok, but we're getting false positives that are damaging people's lives already in the early stages. And I don't want to hear "trust me bro, it will get more accurate" as an excuse to not regulate it.
At a minimum, we should enshrine the right to appeal AI and have limits on how it can be used for probable cause.
This isn't even the only recent case of this happening. There was another case of mistaken identity due to AI. [0] Sure 4 hours isn't the same as 5 months, but still this guy wanted to show multiple forms of ID to prove who he was! The bodycam footage was posted a few months back but never got traction here.
Like if the police officer can't read numbers, they can't do breathalyzer tests on people. If the AI can't be used responsibly, then it can't be used at all.
So what? There were false arrests and convictions made by misuse of line-ups, DNA, eye-witnesses, photos, bloodstains, fingerprints, etc. since forever. You must also blame all those other technologies, so what do you think the police should use to find suspects? In your view, the more help police have, the worse a job they'll do. Is that actually the trend?
> With all other proof you mentioned, there was always a human putting his signature.
There was a human doing that in this case; AI doesn’t inititiate charges. “In his charging document, the detective wrote that Lipps appeared to be the suspect based on facial features, body type and hairstyle and color.”
The article not mentioning the name does not change that the detective did sign the police charging documents.
(Nor does the omission in the article of other names and procedural details change the fact that for there to be actual criminal charges, an arrest warrant, extradition, and incarceration, a number of other people had to sign their names to official acts, including, among others, at least one public prosecutor, and more than one judge.)
This woman lost most of her material possessions, was terrorised by "goons"... The police do this stuff regularly, as black people, immigrants, "white trash" etcetera know well. Another opportunity, presented BY AI models for more routine police oppression
AI is, in this case, a tool enabling it, because trawling large databases using AI allows finding people with a degree of similarity to a suspect that would reasonably constitute probable cause int he context of what was until fairly recently the norm for police work because that work relies on proximity and connections to the crime. The understanding of probable cause and what is necessary for it , given the actual investigative process in the case, including the use of large databases unconnected with the events and locality of the crime needs to adapt.
The point that you're missing is that, in a system where such abuses are possible, many of us really don't want one more tool in their box for them to fuck us with.
Like, they already prove themselves incompetent- giving the power to track anyone in the US via a distributed ALPR system just makes them more dangerous. Giving them all these "AI" based tools does the same.
What do you think the appropriate set of tools for the police is? All the same but without AI face recognition or ALPR? Or also without DNA? fingerprints? guns? Access to government held data like tax filings? Access to other police departments' data?
I don't think they should even have guns, honestly. I am from Texas where we know that they just up and murder folks like Sandra Bland.
They certainly don't seem to use any of that technology well, as you yourself have admitted.
I suppose what I don't understand is why giving them access to more and easier-to-abuse technology would be a "good" thing.
To be clear, I understand that it's the people who kill folks, not guns, and that at the end of the day it's people who need to be held accountable, not the technology. Personally, I do a lot of shooting with a bunch of other queer and trans anarchist folks lately...
But giving more tech to the folks who are already misbehaving without mechanisms to enforce good behavior seems dumb to me.
> I suppose what I don't understand is why giving them access to more and easier-to-abuse technology would be a "good" thing.
I see. It's clear that you're ignoring the whole reason police exist which is to prevent crime. Of course a handicapped police force would prevent less crime than a well-resourced one. That's why it would be a good thing to give them more and easier to abuse technology.
The question is where the right balance is. Maybe having cars is OK because it helps them prevent more crime than what they cause by, say, running people over. Whereas having guns could be a net negative because more people are shot by police than protected by them with their guns. But without data, it's just opinions, probably formed from whatever bias the news has. The fact that you named an individual case suggests your opinion is based on biased news instead of data.
Hoss, you're gonna have a real, real hard time in life if you think that people presenting specific cases means that they aren't aware of the larger patterns of data.
But that level of logic follows from what you're writing here, so it's not surprising you think that...
This particular "AI bogeyman" isn't just AI; it's cops with AI and in particular cops with facial recognition tools, dragnet LPR surveillance tools, and all this other new technology that essentially picks somebody's name out of a hat to have their life temporarily (or [semi-]permanently) ruined by shithead cops who won't ever face any real accountability.
This keeps happening, and the reason it keeps happening is that shithead cops have these tools and are using them. Until we can find a reliable way to prevent this from happening, which may or may not be possible, cops who may or may not be shitheads should not have access to these tools.
Yes! This is about why mass surveillance and dragnets and the like are horrible. These all suffer from people not being able to understand the base rate fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy)
Even if AI facial recognition gets really really good, and is 99.999% accurate, if you use it in this way you are going to arrest more innocent people than guilty people.
If you find a suspect, who has a lot of evidence pointing to them being the criminal and you run a test that is 99.999% accurate and it tells you they are guilty, they are probably guilty.
But if you take that same test and run it against the entire population of the country, it is going to find 3500 people that match with "99.999% certainty" That gives you a 0.02% of the person being guilty.
People don't think like this, though, so they think the person must be guilty.
They don't seem to give a single iota of a fuck about that when a private regular person has their money stolen or their car totaled by hit and run driver. Finding some innocent person to arrest would indicate they are at least pretending to give a fuck, yet they seem to only be bothered to even keep up appearances when it is the bank being robbed.
Sorry, I disagree. This is an example of the corruption inside the American legal system. The cops are at the level of us regulars, and their judgement and actions seem to have no supervision or accountability.
It's not just the shithead cops, it's the voters. All the "Blue Lives Matter", "thin blue line", "back the blue" propaganda works towards giving police infinite powers with zero accountability. This is what voters want and they've said so loudly over and over again.
Let me help you out with this comprehension issue. The point of my comment is that I disagree with the apparent premise of the comment I replied to, which is that "AI" is some generic investigative tool that we can neatly snip out of the picture to blame this incident on human factors at the individual level ("the professional human-in-the-loop who shirked all responsibility"). Said comment also implies that people are fixating on the AI aspect of this issue while ignoring the human factors, which IMO is a strawman. To me, the existence of AI in its current incarnations and the ways in which law enforcement will inevitably abuse it are, together, inseparably, the problem. AI (in the most general sense) opens up entire new dimensions for potential abuse.
As a concrete example:
> And the criminal justice system, for reasons that have nothing to do with AI, let this woman sit in jail for 5 months before doing even interviewing her or doing any due diligence.
Let me state what should be obvious: without AI (as in, the facial recognition systems involved in this case), this woman would not have sat in jail for 5 months, or indeed for any length of time at all. So saying that it has "nothing to do with AI" is totally ridiculous.
> Let me state what should be obvious: without AI (as in, the facial recognition systems involved in this case), this woman would not have sat in jail for 5 months, or indeed for any length of time at all.
How do you arrive at that conclusion? Because it happened, and it wasn't an AI overseeing (the lack of) due process. The police identifying suspects is part of their job. So are arrest warrants and all the rest of it. I honestly don't see what AI had to do with anything here. All I see is a gaping systemic issue that could have happened regardless of AI if the wrong person got the wrong idea or had a personal vendetta.
Suppose ICE busts down someone's door, drags them off, holds them in an internment camp for months, and then finally goes "oh, oops, guess you were a citizen all along sorry about that" and releases them. We don't blame the source of their faulty hit list. We blame the systemic practices and legal apparatus that permitted it all to happen in the first place.
You might as well blame the SUV manufacturer because without vehicles the police wouldn't hav been able to drive over to make the arrest, right?
Because it's beyond obvious? How would this woman have ended up in jail if she hadn't been misidentified by the facial recognition software in use by the Fargo police? She lives 3 states over; would be a hell of a coincidence if some other avenue of investigation led them to her.
> I honestly don't see what AI had to do with anything here.
You honestly don't see what facial recognition software had to do with a woman being misidentified by facial recognition software?
> Suppose ICE busts down someone's door, drags them off, holds them in an internment camp for months, and then finally goes "oh, oops, guess you were a citizen all along sorry about that" and releases them. We don't blame the source of their faulty hit list.
I actually am completely willing to blame any entity that supplies ICE with the names of people it can reasonably assume will be targeted for "enforcement action" due to said entity representing said names as being legitimate targets for said enforcement action, without taking reasonable care to ensure said representation is correct in each and every case.
What you don't seem to understand is that these abuses of law enforcement authority are predicated on at least an appearance of legitimacy, which can be provided by (e.g.) an app with (presumably) a very official looking logo that agents can point at somebody to get a 'CITIZEN' or 'NOT CITIZEN' classification. It is upon this kind of basis that they perform illegal arrests. All parties—the app vendor and ICE, as well as the people who are meant to be overseeing ICE and providing accountability—are complicit enablers in these crimes. To absolve the vendors who provide the software knowing full well what it will be used for, what its limitations are, and how unlikely it is that ICE personnel will understand those limitations and work around them to keep everything legal, is totally absurd.
It isn't obvious, no. If I drop a hammer on my foot and break my toe I can't then blame the hardware store or the manufacturer. If the store didn't carry hammers I wouldn't have been able to purchase it, I think to myself. Then I couldn't possibly have dropped it on my foot, thus my toe wouldn't be broken right now. It's a specious line of reasoning.
It doesn't matter in the slightest by what means she was selected to "win" this particular lottery. The tool rolling the dice isn't to blame. Tools (and people!) will occasionally return spurious results. Any system needs to be set up to deal with that.
So no, I honestly don't see what facial recognition software has to do with gross negligence and process failure on the part of multiple government agencies.
> without taking reasonable care to ensure said representation is correct in each and every case.
Only if that was part of the contract. Was the product delivered according to specification or not?
What if ICE used FOSS tools to put together the list themselves? Are the tools still to blame? That would obviously be absurd.
The only way the provider (never the tool) could be at fault would be something such as willful negligence or knowingly and intentionally attempting to manipulate the user's actions to some end.
What you don't seem to understand is that human negligence can't be foisted off on tools. Of course an abuser will try to play his actions off as legitimate. That isn't the fault of the tool, it's the fault of the abuser. It isn't up to an app to determine the legitimacy of LEO agent actions. Neither is it the responsibility of an arbitrary, fungible government contractor to oversee ICE.
I think you're confusing the morality of participating in a broader ecosystem with moral culpability for the process failure associated with a specific event. You can advance a reasonable argument that AI companies that choose to do business with ICE are making an at least moderately immoral decision. However that doesn't place them at fault for the specific process failures of any particular event that happens.
If you don't agree that facial recognition software is involved in a case of a woman being misidentified by facial recognition software then there is no point in me spending any more time/effort in conversation with you. Goodbye.
You seem to be intentionally ignoring the point I made. I never disputed that facial recognition software was used (ie involved).
The facial recognition tool didn't arrest her. It holds no authority, has no will of its own, and does not possess a corporeal form with which to enact change in the world. The only parties that could possibly be at fault here are various government agents who clearly acted with negligence, failing to uphold their duty to the law and the people.
If you're unable to rebut my point then perhaps you should consider that you might be in the wrong? If you're unwilling to entertain such a possibility then I wonder why you're posting here to begin with. What is your goal?
> I never disputed that facial recognition software was used
You, yesterday:
> I honestly don't see what AI had to do with anything here.
???
> You seem to be intentionally ignoring the point I made.
I completely understand your point. You are saying that if a mentally ill high schooler manages to acquire a gun and kills 20 people at their school, we should a) punish the shooter, and b) understand the gun as a neutral object that simply popped into existence and was misused, rather than a machine whose design purpose is to kill humans, and whose manufacturer(s) (and other organizations who profit from the easy availability of guns) are actively engaged in a broad effort to preserve the status quo which allowed a mentally ill high schooler to acquire a gun and massacre 20 of their classmates/teachers.
I think it's a terrible opinion, and I vehemently disagree with it. But if you are willing to engage in the sort of rhetorical contortions highlighted at the top of this comment, there is no point in expressing my disagreements to you, because you will evidently say literally anything in response. I may as well have a debate about toilet tank design with `cat /dev/urandom`.
> If you're unable to rebut my point then perhaps you should consider that you might be in the wrong?
> This particular "AI bogeyman" isn't just AI; it's cops with AI
You can’t separate the thing from how it will be used. It’s like arguing that cars on their own aren’t particularly dangerous, but the point of buying a car is to use it thus risking the general public.
But you can in fact argue exactly that. If (arbitrary example) pedestrians are being killed due to poor road engineering practices it isn't reasonable to point at cars and say "see those are the root problem" when in fact it's due to a willful lack of sidewalks or marked crossings or whatever. Being adjacent to something bad doesn't equate to being the root cause.
History shows the timeline of dependence here. Before the introduction of cars, “poor road engineering practices” wouldn’t result in those deaths. So clearly it’s cars that are necessitating sidewalks, etc.
Same deal here, if something “becomes a problem” because of the introduction of AI, it’s AI that is the root case of the resulting issues. Many people are tempted to argue that flawed humans can’t implement the perfect system that is Anarchy, Communism, Recycling programs, or whatever but treating systems as needing to operate on the real world is productive where complaining about humans isn’t.
Well I (thought it was obvious that) I was referring to roads constructed relatively recently. If cars necessitate sidewalks and the city chooses to cut costs by not putting those in that isn't the fault of automobile designers or manufacturers or dealers or private owners or whoever.
To your example, technology changes and that necessitates infrastructure changing. That doesn't mean that fault for mishaps in the meantime can be attributed to the new technology. A user operating the new technology in an obviously unsafe manner is solely at fault for his own negligence.
The safest street designs still result in automobile fatalities. You can at best mitigate the issue with better street designs but not address the underlying issue.
Failing to acknowledge cars as the root cause may be comforting, but it blinds you to viable solutions.
Indoor shopping malls for example solve many of the issues with cars by forcing people to move around on foot in a little island surrounded by a sea of very low density parking. They are’t perfect solutions, but they still saved a lot of lives and time.
Saying people are misusing a new technology is just another way of saying that technology is flawed. This doesn’t mean you can’t utilize it, but pretending flaws don’t exist has no value.
> Before the introduction of cars, “poor road engineering practices” wouldn’t result in those deaths.
Death by adverse horse encounter was very common before the 1920s. Not sure how many of those deaths can be blamed on poor quality road engineering. But putting a bunch of humans, carts, and excitable half-ton animals in the same crowded streets seems like poor engineering practice.
very common here is a gross exaggeration compared to cars.
After vast improvements in safety ~1.3% of American deaths are still coming from automobile accidents. Horses were never close to that, meanwhile back in 1970 cars where around twice as likely to kill you.
This article states higher per-capita horse deaths in 1900 New York City than automobile deaths in 2023. This stat does not account for the significant disease caused by all that manure mixing with water supplies. Its unclear if automobile pollution is overall worse from a public health standpoint than mountains of horse poo.
Reminds me of a case that just popped up in my neck of the woods.
Man gets pulled over on an expired plate. They search based on this fact, find a pill bottle (for Irritable Bowel Syndrome) and magically find he’s trafficking cocaine and fentanyl.
I've always maintained one of the worst things that can happen to you is sitting in court before a jury of your peers, because most can't comprehend the meaning of the law outside of their feelings. NOW the worst thing is having yourself in the hands of cops who just don't give a damn or became a cop for the use of power.
This one seems pretty reasonable - according to the article, the cops pulled him over for swerving lanes (driving unsafely on public roads in a reasonable thing to want to police), and then discovered that he was driving on a suspended license, which he admitted to (it's reasonable to have a system for suspending peoples' drivers licenses that is enforced by the police). The police find the pill bottle and don't believe him when he tells them it's a legitimate drug, then "conduct[..] multiple field drug tests, which produced a positive result for fentanyl. Getchius was taken into custody and transported to the Greenwood County Detention Center. Shortly after, another drug test was completed and returned positive results for cocaine."
So it wasn't just the pill bottle, it was multiple other drug tests. I think you could make a reasonable argument that drug use shouldn't constitute a crime in and of itself - although it probably should if you're driving a car, for legitimate traffic safety reasons, I don't find DUI laws objectionable. Or you could make an argument that the criminal justice system shouldn't interfere with peoples' decision to use and sell drugs. I'm sympathetic to this myself, but I think especially in the case of opioids like fentanyl, the situation where government paternalism makes it illegal to sell opioids probably discourages enough destructive use of these drugs by unwise or already-addicted people that it's still net-positive in terms of human welfare. I suspect a society where it was simply legal to use and sell opioids would have a lot more human suffering in it than our own (possibly because in the absence of laws banning open opioid dealing, people who are close to severe opioid addicts might simply commit vigilante murders of suspected opioid dealers, and be left unconvicted by sympathetic juries). And once you hold the position that it's legitimate for the government to legally restrict the sale and use of these drugs, then you necessarily have to have something like police and something like a criminal justice system that investigates whether a person might be actually using and selling opioids and then lying about it.
The fact that the guy was in fact once addicted to some drug and "was working at rehab and addiction centers in Florida at the time of his arrest." is additional evidence that he might have returned to drug use, and there's no way to make cops who investigate opioid-related crimes not think this.
If a field drug test can confuse an irritable bowel syndrome drug for fentanyl or cocaine, it is not reliable enough to be used for law enforcement purposes. The same applies to facial recognition tech. We need real information on the false positive vs false negative rates for tech that purports to establish identity or criminality.
The test didn't confuse the drugs. He tested positive for fentanyl and cocaine. They accused him of trafficking drugs in addition to that because of the IBS pill bottle.
It's an unfortunate story because it sounds like he was having relapse trouble, and the cops were predisposed to do the worst to him that they could (mis)justify, when he needed to cool off and then get back to the professionals helping him with recovery.
It's not. This is just an acceleration in the unraveling of society facilitated by AI. As someone whose childhood included so many "robots will kill humans" books and movies, I am flabbergasted that the AI apocalypse will be dumb humans overtrusting faulty AI in important matters until everything falls apart.
Most humans cannot distinguish AI from actual intelligence. When you combine that with bureaucrats innate tendency to say, "Computer said so," you end up with bizarre situations like this. If a person had made this facial match, another human would have relentlessly jeered him. Since a computer running AI did it, no one even cared to think about it.
Computers are wildly dangerous, not because of anything innate but because of how humans act around them.
> It's not. This is just an acceleration in the unraveling of society facilitated by AI. As someone whose childhood included so many "robots will kill humans" books and movies, I am flabbergasted that the AI apocalypse will be dumb humans overtrusting faulty AI in important matters until everything falls apart.
This is literally the plot of most of those books and the way they differ is in how everything falls apart. In some of them the AI supplants us entirely and kills us all. In others it gets taught to kill us all. In others it gets really good at giving us what we ask for until everything falls apart. But it’s taken as a given that unless we change something innate in our culture AI will be our downfall.
> If a person had made this facial match, another human would have relentlessly jeered him.
The glaringly obvious problem here is that our justice system should not be constructed in such a way so as to be reliant on someone's coworker shaming him. That is not a sensible check against a systemic failure. We're supposed to have due process. If someone skips or otherwise subverts due process the justifications don't matter. The root issue is that due process was skipped. Why was that even possible to begin with?
It could be the fault of the company that's selling this service. They often make wildly inaccurate claims about the utility and accuracy of their systems. [0]
> There's a reason why we don't let AI autonomously jail people.
Yes we do. [1]
> and a criminal justice system that thinks it is okay to jail people for 5 months before even starting to assess their guilt.
Her guilt was assessed. That's why she had no bail. It assessed it incorrectly, but the error is more complicated than your reaction implies.
To clarify one point, her not having a bail is a function of the way interstate ‘fugitive’ warrants are designed. The Court in Tennessee had no ability to set bail, and until she entered the physical custody of North Dakota she can not have bail set.
Also, her guilt was not assessed in any common meaning of the term. The requirement for holding a person in custody, with or without bail, is probable cause. The only thing assessed was did law enforcement present a statement to a Judge that was possible to be believed in the light most favorable to the prosecution.
AI is being used by bureaucrats and enforcers to justify lazy, harmful conclusions. You don't live in the real world if you think "just punish the bureaucrats, don't make it about AI" is going to remotely rectify this toxic feedback loop and ecosystem.
No, we definitely should punish bureaucrats and enforcers who act negligently. If someone in a position of authority flagrantly fails to do his job and it directly harms someone he should be held accountable. That would provide a strong incentive for future actors to take their responsibilities seriously.
If an engineer signs off on an obviously faulty building plan and people die as a result we hold him accountable. This is no different.
It is the fault of the coders, the salespeople who over-promised the capabilities of the system, the lawmakers who have not regulated or demanded a minimum percentage of accuracy from those products, the AI' company's onboarding trainers, the cops that were trained to use the software, the jailers, and maybe other related positions that should've taken a better interest in making a better system, not a more cruel one
It's the fault of the tool because our society treats the tools as superior judgements than humans and to be trusted completely as a means of deflecting accountability - something any and every minority group has been warning about for fucking decades.
The reason everyone rushes to defend the tool's use is because holding humans accountable would mean throwing these tools out entirely in most cases, due to internal human biases and a decline in basic critical and cognitive thinking skills. The marketing has been the same since the 80s: the tool is superior (until it isn't), the tool shall be trusted completely (until it fails), the tool cannot make mistakes (until it does).
If folks actually listened to the victims of this shit, companies like Flock and Palantir would be gutted and their founders barred from any sort of office of responsibility, at minimum. The fact so many deflect blame from the tool like the marketing manual demands shows they don't actually give a shit about the humans wrapped up in the harms, or the misuse and misappropriation of these tools by persons wholly unaccountable under the law, but only about defending a shiny thing they personally like.
>rushes to defend the tool's use is because holding humans accountable would mean throwing these tools out entirely in most cases, due to internal human biases and a decline in basic critical and cognitive thinking skill
The magical past where people had critical thinking skills never existed. We put a lot of trust in tools is because people are unfucking reliable. Hence why in most cases actual physical evidence does a far better job than witness testimony.
This said, people are lazy. It is one of our greatest and worst traits. When we are allowed to be lazy, especially with tools bad things happen.
If many people's writing skills are suffering, due to highly convenient AI support, just imagine how fast mediocre crime investigation skills are going to devolve.
It is going to get bad in every skilled area of human managed bureaucracy.
The number of legal filings found to include AI confabulations is just the obvious surface.
I agree, but our system doesn’t value things that way. Texas, which is one of the highest paying States for cases where intentional, fraudulent, or grossly negligent actions result in wrongful incarceration pay $80,000 dollars per year a person is locked up. But the caveat is that time only starts counting after you are sentenced, so wouldn’t even apply in TFA’s case.
Automation has a strong tendency to degrade diligence.
I see this all the time in operational / production settings. Having a loop with automation reviewed and approved by a human degrades very fast. I only approve automation that has a quick path to unsupervised operation.
I doubt it, due to human nature. Perhaps the process says the human must consciously validate, but a lot of humans in many cases will just rubberstamp what the AI said. That's the risk.
I'll reply to the top of the discussion too: it's because it was purely made for this purpose. There's no use for it outside surveillance. And it's not even good enough. It's only purpose is checking boxes and transferring money. Miscarriage of justice is an unfortunate, but calculated side effect.
Because if you let this slide the human, such as he is, will be removed from the loop and these mistakes will become acceptable once departments get used to how cheap the AI is compared to a human. There will be no going back and mistakes like this will just become accepted collateral damage.
It isn't, the article doesn't claim (or even imply) that it is "the fault" of AI, only that AI was part of the chain of events, and nothing is the fault of AI until AI is sufficiently advanced to constitute a moral actor. “At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer, you will find at least two human errors, one of which is the error of blaming it on the computer” remains true.
OTOH, it is potentially the fault of the reliance human actors put on an AI determination.
This was not a series of errors, this is (as a statistical inference) the system working as designed. This is not uncommon, it is not unplanned. The extradition of suspects from State to State is designed legislatively to function this way.
I also think there is more nuance to this situation than AI bad // Human Bad :: choose one. But while a tragedy, the ‘correct’ functioning of a system that produces tragedy doesn’t make that function and error.
100% 100% 100%
humanity is so obsessed with ai that we're losing...our humanity. "blame the mindless, soulless robots! how could we have possibly known that they need to be supervised?! aren't they basically just humans that don't need to rest or eat?"
Humans being human. Getting lazy, being incompetent, getting incompetent with AI use or simply being biased. The wrongfully arrested person doesn't even resamble the perpetrator.
Maybe if they were held accountable forthese actions, they would act responsibly?
Devils advocate: what if a facial recognition system with a large enough database can always find an unrelated/innocent person that looks similar enough to convince the human?
At this point I think that AI will perform human duties better than human. So probably it's better to let AI autonomously jail people, of course with all the necessary procedures as required by law.
The past year has been strange. Back in 2016, there was so much opposition to Trump. Even after he was elected and granted tremendous power, the other "elites" were staunchly opposed to him and spoke out against him. This despite the fact that the worst thing you can say about DJT in 2017 is that he is an uncouth man.
Fast forward 8 years, and the things we know about DJT today are so much worse than anyone imagined in 2017. He tried to subvert our nation's democracy and political stability. He summoned a mob of rioters, stood idly by while they assaulted our leaders in congress, and eventually pardoned all of them. He has been convicted of multiple felonies, and found guilty in civil court of sexual abuse. People from his own previous administration have called him out as being corrupt and incompetent, and seven Republican senators voted to impeach/convict him.
And yet, despite a jaw-dropping list of unforgivable offenses from the past few years, he enjoys more support today than he did in 2020. From people as smart as Zuck and Andreesen.
It really is true what they say about the fragility of political norms. Once you let the genie out of the bottle, there's no putting it back.
What it is ... is depressing. I've never seen such cowardice and avarice. You'd think these people were being threatened by a mob boss with getting their legs broken. All they need to do is stand for ... something? Rule of Law? The Constitution? Our present and future economic and political strength? It's not hard, just replace their propaganda with truth. Do it slowly so people don't get too mad. Boil them gently until they stop believing the lies. Bring our country back, so the government starts working for the people again. Pick any number of easy non-partisan answers: Term limits or Publicly funded elections. Get the poison out of the system. It just takes the will to do it. Bah, it's hopeless.
> despite a jaw-dropping list of unforgivable offenses from the past few years, he enjoys more support today than he did in 2020. From people as smart as Zuck and Andreesen.
I don't think it is as much support, as not caring enough to be seen to be against, because there are benefits to not being seen as against and previously acting against (it at least bit acting with) has achieved little.
While Shart is in office, and possibly for some time after depending on what the current administration manages to setup over this term, the likes of Zuck have enough to lose by being against three current administration and little to gain otherwise (at least not in the short term).
In a shorter set of words: not support, greed and cowardice pretending to be support.
Not that this changes the right/wrong dynamic of the situation in the eyes of any side…
Most modern incarnations of this idea revolve around Citizen Assemblies. Ireland, as an example, convened a citizen assembly in order to discuss and propose reforms on topics like abortion, climate change, and political reform.
The idea behind Citizens Assembly isn't very controversial. Randomly select a large pool of citizens, have them discuss a topic in great detail with plenty of testimony from experts, and then vote on their recommendations.
In concept, this is very similar to how courtroom juries operate. We don't just let millions of people vote on whether a defendant is innocent or guilty. We instead pick a smaller pool of jurors, force them to sit through weeks of expert testimony and arguments from both sides, after which they cast their votes. Hence why there is a movement to similarly have courtroom juries elect our political representatives as well
I'm always impressed how many of our problems were solved very long ago (in this case, we know Athenians did "Citizen Assemblies" more than a thousand years ago) but then our systems slowly decay and the solution is lost.
That means a well working democratic country with a working welfare and social net will eventually degrade into some random authoritarian shithole. That scares me.
Not true:
While frame as "the holy first democratic state", most people were excluded: The ones who were allowed to vote/elect, were mainly the rich upperclass, Women, Slaves, Children etc. weren allowed to participate / attend.
The only way in which this is relevant is if the populations of voters are different in ways that affect the voting mechanism. For all we care they could have been warlord cannibals: all that matters is that we can use the same mechanism.
I don't see why not just skip the "representatives" part and have juries vote on laws directly.
If you take away the little power people have to influence the government, why not at least do it without adding another layer of indirection?
The idea of a representative is flawed from the start to begin with. There is probably no single person in my country who agrees with me on everything. Therefore any person I choose to represent myself is only an approximation of what I really want.
I increasingly feel like the belief that people need to be ruled by powerful individuals (or worse, i single individual) comes from some primitive need that evolved back when combat ability was your group's primary predictor of survival.
If you have independent votes on everything then you run the risk that there are a bunch of mutually-incompatible things that all get majority approval.
(Would you rather higher taxes or lower? Lower, of course. Higher state pensions or lower? Higher, of course. Stronger or weaker military? Stronger, of course. Better or worse infrastructure? Better, of course. More teachers or fewer? More, of course. More national debt or less? Less, of course. Etc.)
This doesn't require any individual person to be irrational or forgetful or anything, although in fact people frequently are.
Also, whoever selects just which things get voted on has a great deal of power, more than most elected representatives have. If those people are elected then you've effectively got a representative democracy after all; if not, then arguably you've effectively not got a democracy at all.
Representative government as such doesn't solve this problem, but in practice it means that a candidate or party proposes a whole basket of policies to get judged collectively, and between when they get into power and when the electorate decides whether they did a good enough job to elect them again there's enough time for a wide variety of those different interacting things all to have happened and either worked well or not.
I don't want to claim that this works particularly well. But it feels to me like any sort of direct democracy would likely work much worse.
(Maybe there's scope for a hybrid system: elections every few years for representatives who are then obliged to put various classes of major decision to a national vote.)
In theory, I think the argument for juries electing candidates is one of efficiency: back in normal times, there were many, many issues facing Congress in a given year, and they would pass lots of legislation to handle those issues. Empaneling a new jury for each update to the farm bill or appropriation of money for some random government program seems like a lot of overhead. On the other hand, in the current ridiculous US atmosphere, it seems like Congress only passes a couple bills each session, which are enormous omnibus spending bills using strategic pork and legislative tricks to bypass the consensus-based rules that used to be easy to meet before polarization. I don’t think that’s a good condition though.
I agree that the extreme, though, where a jury elects a monarch, would be excessive. I would be interested in a system where separate juries elect government ministers (e.g. Defence, Education, Housing, etc), so that there would be a better chance that average people’s opinions could be taken into account in the running of each of the government agencies, instead of having all of them run by the same ideology because they’re all appointed by one party or president.
Yea one nice characteristic of a representative democracy is that the voting is a rough approximation of who would win if the swords (guns, whatever) came out and it devolved into civil war. But without the bloodshed and loss.
Doesn't work as well as a proxy in the modern age with our level of technology though I suppose.
I dream of this so much. I’ve spent a lot of time in court around juries. It is truly amazing how reasonable people are, how much they listen, and how seriously they take the process. Seeing how regular people acted in jury duty is one of the few things that gives me hope about our country.
By and large, if you give a “Regular Person” a “Solemn Important Duty”, they rise to it and give it their best. We should seek to cultivate institutions that do this far more often.
> Our client didn’t deny he was packaging cocaine at his kitchen table, but he insisted that he was not doing it brazenly in the open; that not only had he covered his windows with taped-up sheets and garbage bags, but he had closed and locked his door, as you might expect for someone engaged in illegal activities. We went to the CHA management offices, where they had records of giving Deuce citations for repeatedly covering up windows. We also talked to the maintenance man who had been assigned to repair Deuce’s door after his arrest. The maintenance crew had taken pictures that clearly showed damage to the doorjamb, backing up Deuce’s claim that the door had been kicked in.
> We proved that the search and arrest were done in violation of the Constitution, and so the evidence collected during the arrest could not be used at trial. The charges had to be dropped.
TLDR: our client was guilty as sin. He admitted it. He was caught red-handed. He still got off scot-free.
Not arguing against any of the above. But this example hilariously contradicts the claim that "the system is stacked against the accused"
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