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Police, prosecutors used junk science to decide 911 callers were liars (propublica.org)
345 points by danso on Dec 28, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 208 comments



This is absolutely wild. There’s a guy out there who’s been teaching these courses for over 10 years, telling police that if someone says “I don’t know” on a 911 call it’s a sign they might have committed the crime.

It sounds like some judges throw this out of court, but people have been convicted based on this stuff.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23556915-911-cops-sc...


My takeaway is that if you are ever on trial for a crime you didn't commit, you need to make sure that your defense attorney knows about this junk science and has a good and usable plan to tear it to shreds, or the jury will listen to some random cop talk about the quaver of your voice and accept that hunch as all of the evidence needed to show that you're guilty.


“Look mam. I've been a police officer for thirty years. I've seen things that you can't imagine. I've seen serial killers, child rapists, and whatnot. I know a criminal when I look them in the eye. When I hear them talk, there's no doubt.”

Investing in an acting coach to help you convince the jury that you are the victim might be a better strategy than teaching science to flat earther jurors.


I imagine you're probably kidding, but as an actor:

There is little an acting coach can do to make you believable. It will likely make you less so. First, you won't be any good to start, and your instincts will get in your way. Second, the kind of things you do to act don't look good in real life. Even the most natural acting is actually highly stylized, and looks good only to a camera or an audience who has suspended disbelief.

You'd do better just winging it and hoping for the best. Your lawyer might give you instructions on how to manipulate a jury, but they will probably just tell you to be honest and let them do the work of putting it into context for a jury.

Acting is a specialized skill that is superficially easy and deeply hard. Crossing from one to the other is an aggravating process of suppressing all the things that make a good naive actor succeed and replacing them with things that feel completely wrong.


Yes, it was a tongue-in-cheek argument. Thanks for your take though. I enjoyed reading an actor's view on the issue.


Until the prosecution find outs. "Why would the defendant hire an acting coach to prep them for the trial if they were innocent?" Another piece of meaningless circumstantial evidence that will be held up as a definitive proof of guilt.


Why would an innocent defendant need a lawyer. Why would someone innocent refuse to answer the question. Why would an innocent person object to their DNA being taken?


Having worked on a lot of trials and prepped many witnesses to testify, my opinion is that the prosecution has no idea when defendants do this.


would that fact be admissible as evidence in the trial? Seems like it shouldn't be because it's irrelevant


Couldn’t you get around that by showing the many times the cop had been in the room with criminals and not known it?

I suppose that’s Perry Mason stuff, but it makes logical sense.

If a cop has a criminal detector, they should be able to detect the criminal from a lineup.

I’ve personally heard police say the exact opposite: criminals can be the last person any would expect …


How would you know, get access to such data

> showing the many times the cop had been in the room with criminals

> detect the criminal from a lineup.

Why would they want to try that, what do they care if you ask them to try


Prisons filled with resting bitch faces and unlikeable, awkward people, the jury system does not produce better justice, just different injustices close aligned to the prejudices of the jurors. Still improvement over the deals.


Conspiracy theorists and people who believe in non-mainstream things (like Flat-earthers) are the last people prosecutors want on juries because they're sympathetic to people who allege to have the system wrongfully working against them.

It's the well to do types who've only ever lived their life in nice places, never stepped out of line and never had much if any adversarial interaction with government systems that prosecutors want on the jury.


It does not actually matter, as you do not get to decide what is admissible in court. You can not simply present any arbitrary line of reasoning or questioning in a criminal trial in the US. A judge could reasonably decide that this junk science is admissible, but that your criticism is not.


Which improves your chances of getting a retrial. Judges do get almost complete domain over their courtrooms, but if they make an error in judgement that sways a jury to a "potentially unjust" verdict, that is grounds for retrying your case.

Allowing an expert witness to testify and refusing to allow a dissenting expert witness to testify is one of those situations.


While I agree with you in principle, it doesn't necessarily hold true. You need to ask another court to declare a mistrial or for other kind of appeal. They can also refuse. You are effectively asking one judge to tell another that they are ignorant of common law.

You also have to be able to afford this procedure, or figure out some way to represent yourself. You might think you can afford it. While inmates are legally afforded access to law libraries, it's basically a joke from my understanding. Something like no more than 1 hour a week.


And then you show up for your trial and they use some other junk science you've never heard of to show that you're guilty.


This and other forensic "science" doesn't need to be good science. That's literally not the purpose at all. The purpose is to convince a jury of the guilt of the defendant that the police and prosecution have already decided is guilty. That's where the incentives are, and that's what happens in practice (as is explicitly clear in this case). CSI probably didn't help matters here.


>CSI probably didn't help matters here.

Indeed, it did not. It's so notorious it has it's own wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect


That's only a sign that it needs to be changed, badly


This is very reductionist. You act as if these people just want to put any random person in prison. If this was true, unsolved murder rates would not be so high. It fails basic logic because from this premise, the police abs prosecutors are ready, willing, and able to prosecute and largely convict innocent people and it is in their benefit to have high clearances. What explains the disparity?


Does every prosecutor not care about the truth? No, of course not. Plenty of prosecutors and police officers actually care that they got the right person. But, there's a lot who only care about chalking up a win and closing a case, not actually getting the right person. There are stories in the news all the time about folks being released after it was discovered they were innocent beyond all doubt after a conviction

> It fails basic logic because from this premise, the police abs prosecutors are ready, willing, and able to prosecute and largely convict innocent people and it is in their benefit to have high clearances. What explains the disparity?

It also looks bad if prosecutors are railroading very obviously innocent people. The only reason it's happening as much as it does is the poor saps who get caught up don't have a very clear alibi or other evidence showing their innocence


You should do some basic research on how many people are falsely convicted. It's a LOT, and that's even allowing for the fact that many of them you'll never know about because they don't have the money to appeal or ever have those false convictions overturned.

No, police do not generally just go grab somebody and prosecute them. But they do regularly go and look for people who might be tangentially connected, determine they are guilty, and make up a case to prove them so. I've seen it happen personally, a good friend of mine spent time in prison for a crime someone else committed, I testified on their behalf at the trial to no avail.

Police and prosecutors want to win. Police get promoted by "solving cases" which has no relation to whether or not the guilty person went to jail, only whether someone went to jail. Prosecutors make their political bones on the backs of people they put in prison -- again, whether they are guilty or innocent doesn't actually matter.


> You should do some basic research on how many people are falsely convicted. It's a LOT

It's something like 4-6%. For some crimes it may be as low as 1% and for others as high as 10%. There are many reasons why this happens and there's no one thing that's going to drastically lower the rate:

- Although it may seem unbelievable, a significant percentage of these convictions were the result of confessions

- A significant percentage of the wrongfully-convicted pleaded guilty

- Oftentimes the defendant is known to police who are reasonably certain they've committed other heinous crimes (this is the "he's guilty of something" argument)

Some information here: https://innocenceproject.org/research-resources/


4-6% is staggeringly high given the consequences. That's roughly equivalent to rolling a D20 and and being wrongfully convicted on a crit fail.


Oh yes, I'm well aware of those numbers.


I mean you can just do basic research on how many people are convicted and how many crimes are committed. You made a false claim that the purpose is just to convince a jury that someone is guilty. This is completely ridiculous and is in line with leftist propaganda. The best thing is to just realize the error than defending this bad assertion. Forensics are used to identify victims and do assist an enormous amount of cases to find perpetrators. Again, you haven’t explained why they are not clearing all if these cases with tangentially connected individuals. Are there false convictions, convictions based on malicious prosecutors not searching for the truth, etc? Yes, of course. But I don’t know if you are familiar with the United States but it it is massive in scale compared to other countries and one of the largest countries without an in-effect autocracy. I think you would be shocked at how many crimes are committed every year and people rely on law enforcement find and prosecute those perpetrators. You might think that sounds stupid or like TV “copaganda” but that is a reality.


I have lived in the US my whole life.

I'm well aware of how the justice system works, as I pointed out above.

My claim is not false, it is borne out by the facts of what actually happens. The comment above lays out the numbers. There is zero incentive in the law for a prosecutor or a police officer to punish the guilty person. There is great incentive to punish someone, anyone so that everyone's statistics look good for promotion.

The reason that not all cases are cleared is that not all prosecutors and police officers are crooks. One could even say that most of them aren't. That fact doesn't bear on my assertion.

And your accusation of me being a leftist is about the silliest assertion anyone has ever made.


> If this was true, unsolved murder rates would not be so high.

This is a non-sequiter, given that a prosecutor wanting to lock anyone up regardless of guilt doesn't imply that they'd be capable of achieving that.


A big criticism that I have heard from "defund the police" folks is that a lot of police departments across the country have more money than sense and accountability. If you are inclined to believe this statement, it is inevitable that they are, in best case, swindled by hucksters selling snake oil, and in worst case, are dabbling in corruption to enrich themselves. Stories like these only add more evidence to that claim.


Folks don't need to accept all the baggage that comes with the "defund" label. You can want rigorous oversight and oppose wasteful spending of public dollars by just being a normal person who always wants those things.


The “defund” label is perhaps the worst marketing of any social movement ever. Nearly everyone would agree with the main nominal ideas - more oversight, less violent responses, more accountability and moving resources away from militarized police and towards social work, specifically psychological interventions.

It’s so bad the tinfoil hat me often thinks it’s an op by the military industrial complex to ensure one of their biggest cash cows never faces budget issues.


>The “defund” label is perhaps the worst marketing of any social movement ever. Nearly everyone would agree with the main nominal ideas - more oversight, less violent responses, more accountability and moving resources away from militarized police and towards social work, specifically psychological interventions.

It's a motte and bailey. The sentiment behind "defund the police" goes well beyond the set of things most people agree with, but its proponents retreat "we actually agree on 95% of the issue" when challenged.

Yes, we do. But the remaining 5% is completely unacceptable.


"Defund the police" means different things to different people; for some, it's "literally abolish the police", but many others it's "implement common-sense budget reforms". For others somewhere in between. The "common-sense budget reforms" group is vastly larger than the first, and I have no idea why they adopted the slogan, or why they continue to defend it. For most, I don't think there's a "motte and bailey" strategy (or indeed, any strategy), just well-intentioned people slapping themselves in the face.

The whole "defund the police doesn't actually mean defund the police" defence is silly , and it makes it appear more people are in favour of "defund the police" than they actually are.


You are summarizing, with near perfect accuracy, the motte and bailey.

“Defund the police” actually does mean “defund the police”, and this despite attempts to dress it up as the more reasonable position that is incidentally held by a significant portion of the American public.

Even if we want to play fast and loose with semantics and interpretation, that particular formulation is chosen because it reflects an extreme position. It is a phrase that conveys (in the most general and imprecise terms) the sentiment of “I support the radical solution”. By construction, it points to a set of beliefs held by radical minority.

The motte and bailey consists in both (1) focusing on the slight differences in opinion between radicals and (2) focusing on the reasonable beliefs that the average person might share with radicals, while ignoring the unreasonable ones that are not shared. Thankfully, most people see through this, if only on a gut level.

The confusion is not accidental; it is intentional.

You are, at best, repeating a dog-whistle of a slogan. At worse, you are playing semantic games. In all cases, I would encourage you — under the charitable assumption that you are not an extremist — to prefer a turn of phrase that more precisely conveys your actual beliefs, rather than one that aims to confuse the issue and radicalize thought. As a bonus, it’ll elevate the level of discourse and make for an interesting discussion.


> You are summarizing, with near perfect accuracy, the motte and bailey.

Certainly not; there is an enormous difference between "I am saying one thing but my secret plan is another thing" and "using a bad slogan that's easily misinterpreted".

I don't like this whole "motte and bailey" kind of stuff in the first place; it's guessing at people's motivations and poison for reasonable constructive solutions or compromises. If everyone keeps guessing at people's motivation and what's in their heart of hearts we'll never get anywhere with anything.

> You are, at best, repeating a dog-whistle of a slogan

I'm not "repeating" it; I'm saying it's a bad slogan, but also adding some nuance because sure, here are some people who mean it literally, but for many others it's "just" a phrase. I wish people would stop using it, yes, but I'm also not going to dismiss the entire argument or movement just because they're using a bad slogan.


What they are summarizing isn't a motte and bailey. The logical fallacy is, rather, that you can immediately dismiss anybody who warmly references the "defund" slogan, by attributing to them all the weirdest things defund true-believers say. No, you cannot. There are no cheat codes in these discussions.


I know several people who see the news about crime at the moment and think the police need larger budgets and that the recent lawsuits about police brutality in the news means police are hamstrung when it comes to apprehending anyone. They also make jokes like "How do you expect a social worker to stop a bank robbery"


It’s not a military op. It’s just overblown leftist culture.


Indeed. Just like you can be against waste in public schools, but if you start marching around with signs that say "Defund Schools" you shouldn't be surprised if people take your sign at face value and don't want to associate with you.


But against the police, once you ask for any oversight or accountability then you no longer back the blue and are the enemy.


The baggage of the defund language is that the rest of the government has already been defunded without complaint.

Calling it defund is an extra critique of funding police instead of social services


Certainly, but you have to admit that the movement has done itself no favors by sticking with that terrible slogan.


Junk science is a huge problem in law enforcement. Treating lie detectors as canonical, the blood splatter analysis to recreate crime scenes, this kind of stuff.

It is especially problematic because police orgs are generally pretty good at adopting new techniques. But unfortunately the marketplace of ideas they have to shop in suffers from overrepresentation of garbage products. A huge part of law enforcement enhancement is going to involve cleaning this market up.


> Junk science is a huge problem in law enforcement. Treating lie detectors as canonical, the blood splatter analysis to recreate crime scenes, this kind of stuff.

I'm not sure what's the bigger problem. The use of junk science by law enforcement or how law enforcement and their methods are portrayed by popular media that ensure the use of junk science (and other harmful methods) can persist long-term. I'm sure everybody and their mother has seen Dexter (who works as a blood splatter analyst) or any number of shows/movies or all the news where police dogs are portrayed in an incredibly positive light (I'm looking at you, Paw Patrol).


> any number of shows/movies or all the news where police dogs are portrayed in an incredibly positive light (I'm looking at you, Paw Patrol).

Listen dude there I have enough beef with paw patrol to make a texas ranchers BBQ look ill equipped, from the fact the mayor is an idiot, that obnoxious chicken the fact the town has outsourced all of it's emergency functions to what is basically the mafia, the fact that they sit on a money printer of toys and the fact that the song haunts my house day in and day out.

But to say that Paw Patrol is a problem because it has a police dog in it and that he helps people is equivalent to saying that Daniel Tiger is anti-Democracy because it has a Royal Family.


Does Daniel Tiger portray a royal family as benevolent, and a democratically elected leader as incompetent? If so, it sounds like it's anti-democracy. Perhaps unintentionally so, but perpetuating those mythologies nonetheless.


> the fact the mayor is an idiot, that obnoxious chicken

Man, for real. Literally every other episode this lady loses her chicken and the paw patrol have to risk life and limb to get it back. Like, at some point, maybe you shouldn't have a pet chicken?


I think you will enjoy this video breakdown from Skip Intro: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rwhUpu9MfZ0

It’s a superb video essay and absolutely worth the watch! But to be clear, it’s also playing into the meme that paw patrol is copaganda, so take it as a mix of comedy and serious analysis :)

The gist of the video is that, while paw patrol is not copaganda, it is problematic for parallel reasons. It’s also a terrible tv show as you noted.


I wouldn’t say it is superb. On this channel every third video is about how sone random show is “copaganda”, literally. The concept of that portmanteau is already fairly stupid to begin with.


Ever heard "don't judge a book by its cover"?

Skip Intro has excellent videos all in all. "Copaganda" is his series diving into cop shows (and analyzing them in the context of what is and isn't copaganda). He doesn't claim that a particular show is copaganda just because he's analyzing it.

If you "wouldn't say [the video] is superb" because, instead of watching it, you've looked at the titles of his other videos, I dunno what to tell you.


Other than the chicken, that description is a perfect match for New York City.


As someone with a 5 month old this post is simultaneously enlightening, hilarious and terrifying.


Also, why isn't there more supervision of Alex who has to be near 6?

Daring Danny X and his antics have with Alex's accidents have got to be near a third of their call volume


HN comment of the year


Glad this didn't come 4 days later.


How? It's mostly devoid of substance or any real insight or understanding. It's not a great comment just because you happen to agree with it. Just check out the Skip Intro video if you don't get it, it's like a 101 course on media as propaganda and the effects of media on cultural values.


This is the HN comment of the year: whiny, pedantic, and with a weird agenda.


So you have nothing to say of substance either. This is HN, not Reddit. If you can't contribute, this isn't the place for you.

And yes, my agenda of wanting more accountability for police who murder citizens and destroy their lives by abusing their power is "weird". What's wrong with you?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Harris Or maybe you just don't care that the Supreme Court decided that police dogs are fine and current training is sufficient to prove their reliability despite overwhelming evidence showing otherwise

> Harris was the first Supreme Court case to challenge the dog's reliability, backed by data that asserts that on average, up to 80% of a dog's alerts are wrong.

> In the first 9 months of 2011, dogs alerted (and police searched) 14,102 times, and drugs were found only 2,854 times—a false alert rate of 80%. Those results, they say, are surprisingly consistent – in 2010, the false alert rate was 74%.[3] Further still, the study found that individual dog's performance varied wildly, with accuracy rates ranging from a high of 56% to a low of 7%, with two-thirds of the dogs performing below the average.

> The United States Supreme Court returned a unanimous decision on February 19, 2013, ruling against Harris and overturning the ruling of the Florida Supreme Court.[29] In the unanimous opinion, Justice Elena Kagan stated that the dog's certification and continued training are adequate indication of his reliability, and thus is sufficient to presume the dog's alert provides probable cause to search, using the "totality-of-the-circumstances" test per Illinois v. Gates. She wrote that the Florida Supreme Court instead established "a strict evidentiary checklist", where "an alert cannot establish probable cause ... unless the State introduces comprehensive documentation of the dog's prior 'hits' and 'misses' in the field ... No matter how much other proof the State offers of the dog's reliability, the absent field performance records will preclude a finding of probable cause."[30]


You joke but there are leftist articles about Paw Patrol and the patriarchy, globalism, and every other -ism you can imagine.


Ya but there are leftists articles about everything it turns out when you put 7 billion people on the internet and give them the ability to say things you can find lots of stupid things.


> But to say that Paw Patrol is a problem because it has a police dog in it and that he helps people is equivalent to saying that Daniel Tiger is anti-Democracy because it has a Royal Family.

Any positive portrayal of police in US media is problematic. Teaching children to trust the police is only going to get some of them jailed on fabricated evidence or killed, especially if they aren't white and affluent.

edit: Ok, apparently Paw Patrol is Canadian, so mea culpa. I guess the police are actually civil servants there. It's still a problem when shown to US children.


Why is and positive portrayal of police problematic? I think the leftist notion if “problematic” is problematic. You’re being very hyperbolic by writing that trusting police will get you killed and jailed. That is something someone living in a leftist / TikTok fantasy world would think.


It's what someone living in the real world would think. Ask any defense attorney if you don't want to believe random internet commenters.


I love in the real world and know that’s nonsense. So, if I poll 10,000 defense attorneys, 90% or more are going to tell me this childish nonsense. What if I polled victims of crime, let’s include victims of police crime, my guess you might think the majority of crime must be done police.

Actually, by your logic, you must think the vast majority of crimes or an enormously significant amount of crimes are committed by police because you claim trusting police will get you killed or jailed. However, it is certainly true that enormous numbers of people “trust”, in some sense, the police but the problem we do not see the numbers of those people being killed/jailed to support your position.


Portrayal of police dogs in a positive light is necessary because otherwise people would see them for what they are: living probable-cause generators and loopholes on laws and regulations on police brutality.

There's plenty of evidence police dogs are worse than a coin flip and react to their handlers - but the supreme court said that was irrelevant and upheld basing a search off a dog's reaction to be valid. Dogs also act as a proxy for brutal, violent treatment of someone.


The media is a trailing indicator. It can lead to feedback loops and reinforce the bad behaviors it represents, but things like Dexter come about because some writer hears about police using blood spatter analysis and mythologizes it.

If junk science were rejected where it matters, the media wouldn’t use it either, or would at least treat it they way they do dowsing or psychics.

The media will serve any demand, no matter how dumb. But there has to be demand. That’s my theory anyway.


It's a feedback loop, yes. You need popular support from voters to be able to implement changes in police procedure. Who's going to vote for the guy who wants to "gut" law enforcement methods when all their lives TV has told them that's just what the police does and how criminals are caught? Especially when the other guy is saying "look at him, he wants to protect criminals".


It's not a trailing indicator or feedback loop when you have the police and military actively pushing narratives on TV producers and Hollywood, even controlling scripts in exchange for access to extras and military equipment/facilities.


Those are at least fiction. I have seen documentaries where pseudo psychology (not holding eye contact means you are lying, this or that entirely normal behavior treated as something chillingly sinister, parent deemed nit sufficiently crying) was treated as sure clue of guilt.

And gut feelings, gut feelings of detectives were literally treated as evidence in those documentaries


Most documentaries should be considered a subgenre of fiction. Inspired by reality, but mostly interested in telling a compelling narrative.


They're not always treated as fiction though. Some police officers model their behavior after what they see on TV. And police departments have given shows access to locations and props in exchange for favorable portrayal. John Oliver did a show about it recently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNy6F7ZwX8I



I think the practice is supposed to be a little more than what's depicted there. When they start an interrogation, they try to ask light or at least easy questions to see how a suspect answers without real pressure, then when they hit a hard question, they compare the responses and look for clusters of behavior which might indicate deception when taking into account how they behaved in contrast through the rest of the questioning. Not to say that it's going to be particularly accurate/good.


Right, but to oversimplify, as innocent as I am, I will react differently when asked "enjoying the weather today", "where were you on night if December 12th", and "did you murder Mukelefa Stanjipoljic". There'll be contrast just as baseline!

I had a law enforcement in-law who was confident he could figure out a man by shaking his hand and looking at him in the eye, etc etc. He was perennial favourite of all the sleezy salespeople around because while he was certain he was getting a deal and being taken care of and getting the good stuff, for anything I had any insight into (computer, car, photo, and music stuff), he was getting ripped six ways to Sunday. But his confidence was not to be shaken.


I'm pretty sure that the lack of police accountability is a far worse problem, to be honest. It eliminates any chance that we can reform law enforcement to any significant degree.


They are somewhat intertwined though. If police can feed anyone to the DA, and the DA can then use a variety of sketchy tactics (including junk science, but mostly other stuff) to punish them, then it all works. If it kept resulting in cases that get thrown out, the feedback loop would slow it down some.


I've often wondered how exactly Paw Patrol's ample budget is allocated and under what authority they operate. Moreover, does the mayor using them for her personal errands constitute an abuse of power?


I can absolutely imagine "CSI: Phrenology", if the timeline had worked out a little differently.


Let's make sure we add "gunshot detection" to this list, since that is the currently popular for-profit junk science product that police are pouring millions of dollars into acquiring all over the US.


I’d be interested in understanding this better - what kind of sensors do you have in mind that are junk?


ShotSpotter’s results are iffy, which appears to be a combination of a) ShotSpotter employees overriding the AI and b) weaknesses in the tech. There’s also some potential for reinforcing bias if you only put the sensors in neighborhoods you’re already worried about.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28264686 has previous discussion on this from a number of viewpoints.


The goal of police is public safety, and nothing to do with preventing reinforcing biases.

If you designed a polar bear detector to help prevent people from being eaten by polar bears, would you also deploy them in Florida for the sake of fairness, even though there are no polar bear attacks there?


The problem is that ShotSpotter doesn’t actually work very well at all.

I mean, if I make a magic box that has a 1% chance per day of calling the police and telling them a crime happened nearby and then only stick that box in areas where poor people live, you could see how that would lead to a whole lot of calls for police in those areas. You can also see how, by having a vastly higher police presence in those areas, more crimes will be detected in those areas, even if the base crime rate is the same as in a different area.

In the past, ShotSpotter employees have gone into the system and changed things after the fact to claim that their system detected shots in a specific area that it never detected. They did this while working with the police to come up with probable cause for an arrest after the arrest happened.

This kind of thing makes it easy for the cops to arrest people they want to arrest without any actual evidence of a crime. This is generally considered a bad thing in the USA.


I still encounter people who think a map of crime is an actual map of crime, like SimCity, and not a map of policing. They really do believe it reflects reality. Most times they snap out of it when you point out it's impossible to map crime without collected data, and then it's a short hop to realize policing is how you get that data. And any intellectually honest person will recognize the biases inherent to that data.


These biases are also present in murder convictions, widely used to benchmark crime rates over time and geography due to the inability of police to ignore dead bodies selectively.

It could be possible that police and police chiefs are in fact, putting this equipment in poorer neighborhoods because that is where the most gunfire already is.

Concerns about the relationship between employees and prosecutors are real, but "reinforcing biases" is the least of our worries in regards to marginalized communities when they are murdered at 5 to 20x the rate of the nonmarginalized communities.

Black communities are majority-support of the same or more police per Gallup https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...

Removing police from poorer areas hurts poor people more than edge case concerns about individual prosecutors playing fast and loose.


I’d like the public to be safe from the public servants who carry guns as part of their day to day work. If those public servants are biased to believe that my neighborhood is less safe than it is, they’re more likely to use force when it isn’t warranted. Thus, I’m not as safe.

I conclude that it is a matter of public safety to avoid reinforcing biases.

Since the article this thread is about shows that some portion of police are willing to believe any damn thing, I think my concerns are reasonable.


> If those public servants are biased to believe that my neighborhood is less safe than it is

Could it be "bias" to look at crime statistics? Maybe it's less safe than you think it is.


Indeed! Seems like the simple answer is "if you're going to install sensors, better to just install them everywhere to avoid bias in any direction."


In a city you'd deploy them on the corner of every street and alley. Do you deploy them in the same density through rural and country areas?

Do you plan to also change fire regulations to call for an even distribution of sprinklers? Presumably you don't want to die from fire-bias either...


Yeah, I think it would be good to deploy them evenly throughout a city. Unfortunately that doesn’t actually happen.


So you think that putting them in high crime areas is "bias?"


The bias is assuming that there's no crime because the sensors weren't there to pick it up.

A low crime statistic can either mean crime didn't happen, or the statistic didn't count the crimes that did


So you think only gunshot sensors measure crime?


Can I very gently ask you to go back and read the topic of this post? If, after you’ve done that, you still want to argue that police departments are universally good at avoiding bias, we can probably conclude that this isn’t a useful conversation for either of us.


That seems to be the go-to response when you've lost the argument. OK. We're done here.


You are either being deliberately obtuse or truly ignorant, given how you have missed the main points of the argument and engaged in strawman fallacies. It is probably the latter, since you have implied (by 'go-to response') that people are commonly asking you to re-read what they said. A strong hint that you are the problem.

Besides the original comment, you can also read the multiple comments elsewhere in this thread making similar points. I am not too hopeful it will help, since your reading comprehension is obviously lacking.

Clearly, the all-too-common combination of stupidity and arrogance is alive and present in you. It is embarrassing how someone who have lost the plot then turns around and says that it is the other party that has lost the argument. Too stupid to understand and arrogant enough to inflict your ignorance on others. Thankfully, many of the users here easily recognized your hubris. No, it is you who are done. How humiliating.


.. and now I look you up and see "created: 22 hours ago"

So you're not even a real HN'er. Why don't you tell everyone who it is who's so free with the insults? Or are you scared to take responsibility for them?


Such invective. You must have a pretty empty life to even bother writing so much.

But you can't leave it alone now, can you? Maybe now you'll have to write fifty paragraphs. Stay up all night doing it, too.


> If you designed a polar bear detector to help prevent people from being eaten by polar bears, would you also deploy them in Florida for the sake of fairness

This is already reinforcing bias, because your question presumes that the places law enforcement deploys this tech are where it needs to be. To use your analogy, cops like deploying polar bear detectors based on how much snow falls in a place, because "everyone" knows that polar bears live in snowy places.


This system is not designed to find out where shootings happen. We know that already. It's just designed to detect them faster.


No it's designed to manufacture evidence that they can use to help them get arrest warrants and eventually convictions.


> We know that already

No, we don't. We know where law enforcement, which we already know is biased, reports shootings happening.Those are two completely different things.


There is no organized conspiracy among law enforcement to hide the location of shootings.


There doesn't have to be. That's why it's bias.

For a really contrived example, in a police department of one for the whole world, put the only officer in Antarctica. You'll find there's only officially shootings in Antarctica


The Antarctica example is not meaningful in the US where police are a universally present institution. There is not a significant number of unreported shootings in the USA. Bodies get found. Victims show up at the hospital. People call the police.

If you are claiming that there is significant bias here, you must present evidence that there are unreported shootings in an amount to make up a significant percent of all shootings in the US, or that there is an organized conspiracy by law enforcement to mislead the public about the location of shootings.


> The goal of police is public safety

To be clear... the goal of the police _force_ is to enforce the law. The goal of (some) individual police officers is public safety, but certainly not all of them (and some days, it seems like not many of them... but you generally only hear about the bad stuff in the news, so take that with a grain of salt).


The goal of the police is to have secure jobs with a decent salary and benefits, and ideally be meaningful in some way (could be promoting public safety... could be exerting power over others).

Often enforcing the law helps secure budgets (especially when it comes to enforcing drug laws with lucrative civil forfeiture seizures), but more recently many police departments have tried a different tactic when budgets have been threatened: actively refusing to enforce the law, in order to increase crime and prompt political change.


The police increase crime?


The goal of the police is to maintain the status quo.


They use microphones to detect gunshots. It works in a controlled environment but in an actual municipality the data needs enough "massaging" by human analysts to get what are still fundamentally low-quality tips it's somewhere between redundant and a waste of resources.


> the data needs enough "massaging" by human analysts to get what are still fundamentally low-quality tips it's somewhere between redundant and a waste of resources.

And those analysts are part of a law enforcement community that is rife with biases about crime and guns, which means most of the places where the system finds gunshots are where the biased people (who by default placed the detectors according to a bias) expect to hear gunshots.


If you've ever shot a gun or been around guns you'd know the rapport of various guns is not always consistent. Often, it is difficult to tell the difference between a gunshot and a firework for example. Even something like dropping a wood pallet far enough away can sound like the echos of a gunshot. Backfiring from a car can sound remarkably close to a small caliber rifle. If a gunshot doesnt happen quite literally within a few dozen feet of you it's often hard to tell. Typically the way you can tell is people who shoot guns generally don't do it once. Several rapports tend to raise the probability of a gun.

ShotSpotter works in isolation because in isolation a certain noise profile is almost certainly a gun shot. Like most ML aiming to change the world it's powered by p-hacking.


the report, rapport is not something I want to have with a gun unless I am a character in Full Metal Jacket


Flock Safety Raven

Gunshot Detection and Location System

Combine gunshot detection with ALPR evidence to drive better outcomes

https://www.flocksafety.com/products/raven


The list goes on: instant-drug tests used for traffic stops with undeclared and uninvestigated false positive rates, drug sniffing dogs (cf. https://reason.com/2021/05/13/the-police-dog-who-cried-drugs... for example), burn patterns in arson investigation, etc.


Agree.

The problem imo is that cops have an insular culture and are trained to control situations. That control is often an Illusion. They are also often exempt from some of the procurement rules that apply to other government entities. So they tend to accept handshake claims from people identified as “good guys” through some connection or the salesman’s former on the job status.

Another issue is that they don’t pay for or maintain technology in many cases, and the organizations tend to want to fund overtime, gas and bullets over all else. Police rely on grants to buy stuff with tight timelines. So there’s a tendency to blow the federal grant quickly on something cool that some “good guy” promises.


Citations Needed did an episode a few years back on how TV Copaganda represents forensics as a much more solid "science" than it actually is. https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-94-the-goofy-pseu...


I don’t think it’s that the market is full of garbage. There is a demand from law enforcement for the garbage. They want science tools to confirm their biases and broken practices.


Not really science tools. They want authoritative looking tools to confirm their biases and broken practices.

A scientific tool could prove a different direction than what law enforcement wants it to say.


I am terrified of affecting someone's health, freedom or money (especially health and freedom) unknowingly, mistakenly etc. How do people who lie in court, use unproven tools etc to screw someone's entire life sleep at night? This is so far beyond my comprehension.


Well, for starters, they don't actually think their junk science is junk science. If you're confident that you were right all along, and you nailed the "bad guy," you're going to sleep just fine. All of these people believe they're helping further the cause of justice; very few go to work thinking "this is bullshit, I know it, and I don't care." Given their training and experience--even though it's experience in a field we later define as junk science--they become confident in their own work, and confirmation bias is omnipresent. Not just for individual cases, but for entire forensic fields and methods.

It's not exactly the same, but there have been countless examples of prosecutors and police officers who, when faced with convictions overturned due to DNA evidence, continued to maintain that the person was nevertheless guilty despite that evidence. And if I'm being totally honest, I can't even imagine how tempting that fantasy would be.

The alternative is acknowledging that you got it wrong and an innocent person paid an extraordinary price for your failure, losing years of their life behind bars. Worse yet, your failure allowed allowed the actual murderer/rapist/etc. to get off scot-free and potentially harm others.

It's terrifying enough to imagine screwing up a single case. Now imagine screwing up hundreds or possibly thousands, after spending years using what you believed to be forensic science that turned out to be little more than bullshit. In that light, the temptation to search for alternative explanations, fight against information and evidence that contradicts your theory of the case, etc. has to be overwhelming. And while there are absolutely people in the justice system who don't succumb to that temptation, there are plenty who do.


> Well, for starters, they don't actually think their junk science is junk science.

For starters, they don't actually care. If it will provide an excuse which can arbitrarily and selectively be cited to justify action, they will embrace it and train their officers on it; if public belief in it is likely to lead to more deference to law enforcement and fear of crime, they will also blast it in their PR (see magic fentanyl). If it will provide an excuse for actions that woild otherwise seem to violate civil rights, they’ll also invest heavily in it.

Truth isn’t relevant to many od the things police agencies pay to train officers on; power is. And the people—often former law enforcement themselves—crafting and selling these ideas know the market they are targeting.


They convince themself that the person is really guilty (of something, maybe not even the thing they are accused of, just generally bad / evil / wrong color / wrong religion. really whatever it takes for them to believe someone deserves punishment) .... then the ends justify the means.


"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair


Yeah this isn’t surprising considering these are the people who think touching or breathing near fentanyl can kill you


It doesn't help that law enforcement organizations seem to higher the dullest knives in the drawer, of course they can't tell bs from non-bs. Whatever confirms their biases gets green-lit


The thing is that prosecutors and courts are supposedly harboring some of the sharpest knives in the drawer, yet they cheerfully accept and often pass on BS at face value when it's expedient to do so.


> The thing is that prosecutors and courts are supposedly harboring some of the sharpest knives in the drawer, yet they cheerfully accept and often pass on BS at face value when it's expedient to do so.

Court system have one basic goal, to be a test if accused party have enough money to spend on lawyers, experts and their expertise. Affluenza much?


Supposedly is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, considering the state of the system I have a hard time believing it


There should be some kind of penalty for people using methods that have zero evidence to back them up, or at least they should be forced to present accurate error predictions so that unproven techniques such as fingerprint analysis can be admitted, but with the likelihood of a match happening by chance.


I don't see how stuff like this isn't fraud. I mean, if I gave money to someone, and they told me they would teach me how to cultivate magic beans that would make me happy or rich; and then it turned out that they don't know such a technique, and can't teach it (because it doesn't exist).

I see how people get away with this as pundits or advocates because the money involved is indirect (they are lying for position or notoriety, not directly taking someone's money) but teaching a fake science "technique" for money? How is it different than selling snake oil?


For example the method of human caging, which there is a large and growing body of research establishing does not prevent crime. https://daily.jstor.org/rethinking-prison-as-a-deterrent-to-...


Even if jail were completely ineffective as a deterrent (which isn't true), it would still prevent crime, since the rest of the world is safe from prisoners while they're in jail.


> since the rest of the world is safe from prisoners while they're in jail.

Does this mean you would be in favor of judicial reform that prevented those convicted of non-violent crimes from going to prison? No reason to keep someone locked up on a petty possession charge if our concern is safety of others.


Do you think we shouldn't send people like SBF, Elizabeth Holmes, and Bernie Madoff to jail, since their crimes were non-violent? And what about Al Capone, who was responsible for a bunch of violence, but the only crime we could get a conviction for was tax evasion, which is non-violent?


Yes, I think that non-violent offenders should not be sent to jail, and I think that we should only punish people for what we can prove in a court of law.


What do you think should happen to non-violent criminals? How would you enforce laws pertaining to non-violent crimes or are such acts by definition non-crimes under your worldview?


I mean...surely you're aware that, at this time, already, there are many people committing non-violent crimes, and being sentenced, and not being incarcerated, right? Punishments include fines, travel restrictions, wage garnishment, loss of license or ability to hold certain types of position, monitoring of movement, there's quite a list. Unless you think "all people convicted of a crime go to jail" is already true- and it is not- the answer to your question is "what we're already doing".


Would jailing them fix the mess they made? Would making them work to fix the mess they made be more effective?

Locking people up only prevents them committing crime while they're locked up. It doesn't do anything to solve the actual problem.


It is a deterrent. You could pretend it’s not but that doesn’t make it less true. When more crypto scammers go to jail, it has an effect on people’s risk taking behavior. Of course it does. To say it doesn’t is fallacious.


> It is a deterrent. You could pretend it’s not but that doesn’t make it less true. When more crypto scammers go to jail, it has an effect on people’s risk taking behavior.

The only thing that is actually a deterrent is actually catching criminals [1]. No criminal does what they do expecting that they'll get caught and then weighing the crime against the potential sentence.

> Of course it does. To say it doesn’t is fallacious.

"trust me bro, its common sense"

[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-best-way-to-end-mass-incarc...


You can use this “trust me bro” nonsense but it is obvious to anyone that can think clearly that the threat of prison time deters crime. It is not 100% effective, obviously but it deters potential criminals. People do make risk based decisions based on the possibility of getting caught and facing prison. I don’t know what it says that you think this obvious fact is some kind hand waving.


It's not a deterrent, though, because they're still doing it.

Does it fix the problem? Does it get the people they scammed their money back?


It is very clearly a deterrent. So you think anyone who ever considered committing a crime was never deterred by the possibility of prison? People say all the time “I was going to do X but I didn’t want to go to prison” that prima facia is an example of deterrence to the extent that many such people were serious. Honestly, I shouldn’t need to use such a banal example for something so obvious.

Furthermore, you are therefore implying that if we did not issue any prison sentences then we would have the same amount of crime as we do now (or possibly you think it would be less) because the threat of prison has no effect of deterrence. That is unbelievably ridiculous.


The people who committed crimes weren't deterred by prison sentences. Once they're released from prison, they will continue to commit crimes. Prisons don't work.

Let's put it this way - suppose someone is too illiterate to get a job (like a huge chunk of the prison population) and turns to theft to support themselves, possibly because they have a drug habit. Does locking them in prison make them any more less addicted to drugs, or any more able to get a job? Does it actually solve the underlying problem?


Could you answer the question you were asked instead of haranguing the person who asked it?


"safety" in this context need not mean solely physical safety.


I think imprisonment needs to be rethought if it's not used for rehabilitation purposes.

I believe that if you CAN be rehabilitated into society, you SHOULD be, and any imprisonment should be used for that purpose and that purpose alone.

If you CANNOT be rehabilitated into society, you shouldn't be imprisoned with the other people who can be, but should be put off in a group of your other "irredeemable" peers or something.

I think anyone CAN be rehabilitated, by the way, but not everyone will want to.


This assumes that a person is either a criminal who will do crimes, or is not and won't.

What studies show about this over and over is that being in certain situations increases the likelihood of a given person committing a certain crime. If you remove them from the situation, but now someone else is in that situation, the likelihood of the crime is being committed is unchanged.

Now people there is variance in how resistant people are to the influences of those situations, and it varies both by individual and by the specific crime. It's possible that eventually you will have imprisoned everyone who would ever commit a crime under any circumstances, or at least under the current ones. I don't find the costs of that acceptable, both financially and in terms of human suffering. But if you do you should argue for that, rather than lean on the implicit point that some people are inherently criminal by their natures and so should be isolated for it.


> there is variance in how resistant people are to the influences of those situations, and it varies both by individual and by the specific crime

How is this not just another way of saying "some people are inherently criminal by their nature"?


Not OP, but it's about the situation, not something fundamental to the person.

I'd also add there is nuance here. Not everyone in a situation will behave the same way. What's changing is the tendency towards behavior due to environment.


So you believe that in the same situation all people are equally likely of committing a crime?

So everybody in the US just has a random small chance of becoming a school shooter or serial killer?

I assume you support complete elimination of the criminal justice system and courts then, because in your worldview it seems criminals have no agency and the chance of them committing a crime is 100% a function of their environment.


But prison makes people more violent, and people tend to be released eventually. Unless you're willing to imprison everyone forever, the calculus isn't that simple.


Only if you never release anyone, because otherwise there is the possibility that it would increase instances of crime _more than if they had never gone to jail_ after release.


Actually, that's provably false: older people commit fewer crimes.


In general, yes they commit less crimes. But does a 45yo person who was caged for 5 years and neglected commit less crimes than a 40yo free person?


You could research that; of course you'd have to control for "having committed a crime in the first place."


Also, if you don’t ruin someone’s life based on a false conviction, the impact of the inevitable junk science is reduced.


This is terrible research and JSTOR should be ashamed of themselves for publishing it.

> They randomly assigned criminal cases to judges within the court (in other court systems, case assignment isn’t random). If the future crime rate ended up lower for people sentenced by lenient judges than by judges who sent more people to jail, it would be clear evidence that time in jail — not any quality within the criminals themselves — was making the difference.

No it does not evidence that conclusion. Judges have written sentancing guidelines. A repeat offender, vicious offender or someone who has burned up their three strikes is likely going to both get a serious prison sentance and reoffend.

You can't disentangle that reasoning on a post hoc statistical analysis. That is pseudoscience.

> the data suggest that people held in jail before trial have a higher likelihood of committing crime after their release than people who remain in the community before trial.

The article goes on to argue that this is because people no longer trust the system.

We use pretrial detention for criminals who are either more likely to flee or committed more serious offenses.

That conclusion from JSTOR has no evidence and flies in the face of any sane reasoning. They didn't even questionnaire the re-offenders!


> A repeat offender, vicious offender or someone who has burned up their three strikes is likely going to both get a serious prison sentance and reoffend.

Did you read the actual studies to see if they controlled for this very obvious objection? Seems important when accusing of incompetence.

> We use pretrial detention for criminals who are either more likely to flee or committed more serious offenses

We also use it for people who can't afford to get out, who then often lose their jobs, possibly where they live, etc. I know this because the article states that directly, not your "article goes on to argue that this is because people no longer trust the system" summary which doesn't appear to be part of the article (but maybe I just missed it?).

> “Holding them for a couple days, a couple months pretrial has devastating implications[1] for their lives,” Ghandnoosh says. Many find it hard to keep a job, hard to keep their housing. Such outcomes for a minor offense or no offense at all, she says, makes it more difficult to live a law-abiding life and could tip people into crime.

Seems like lots of evidence in the article, actually, and overall the criminologists quoted seem very careful to not overstate the conclusions the evidence can support.

[1] https://www.cato.org/research-briefs-economic-policy/economi...


It's really easy to do the reflexive HN contrarian takedown on pretty much any single piece of work if you're motivated to do so.

This isn't the only piece of work on this subject nor the best nor even a representative one. If you're interested you could look into this entire domain of research and see what it suggests.


This is a variant of ad hominem attack. He must be "motivated" to disagree with you. It's "reflexive."

Maybe he just disagrees. If you didn't present "the best nor even a representative" link, why don't you contribute to the debate and present it?


> This isn't the only piece of work on this subject nor the best nor even a representative one.

Then why did you post it?


A jury isn't particularly going to understand what those likelihoods are. People are really bad with probability


Well that can either be dealt with be educating the particular jury or if that's not feasible then maybe trial by jury isn't applicable if they are unable to understand the evidence provided.


In theory, there are two penalties that already exist: The state not getting a conviction because the defense excludes the evidence based on the Daubert standard, or, if that craps out, the defense planting a reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury by pointing out that the prosecution's case is built on nothing.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/daubert_standard

> Under the Daubert standard, the factors that may be considered in determining whether the methodology is valid are: (1) whether the theory or technique in question can be and has been tested; (2) whether it has been subjected to peer review and publication; (3) its known or potential error rate; (4)the existence and maintenance of standards controlling its operation; and (5) whether it has attracted widespread acceptance within a relevant scientific community.


That’s not a penalty though, if the case gets thrown out it’s just non-reward.


I think the bar for prosecutorial misconduct is higher than that, but maybe it should include trying to present bad science.


If you spend several work weeks on a project and I take it out back and burn it down, we would all describe that as me doing harm to you.


If you pay me to work on a project, you can burn it for all I care as long as the check clears.


And if I pay you significantly less than your peers, on the theory that the work is a personal calling?

https://michiganprosecutor.org/careers/current-positions/858...

https://www.bcgsearch.com/bestlawfirms/KrjDr/Miller-Canfield...


Then I should be subject to increased oversight and scrutiny in case I start taking kickbacks to make up the difference or botch jobs out of spite.


One of the things I like about HN is the exposure to people with worldviews that are fundamentally incompatible with mine. It's a refreshing anti-bubble.

I'm a lawyer who paid off some debt at a large firm straight out of law school, before going into government service. More than a decade later, I still don't make as much as I did when I was 24. I find it exceedingly difficult to imagine anyone making the same move if they were so motivated by money that they'd be susceptible to kickbacks.


Hell, that describes like 95% of my career.


This famous edict: Don't Talk to Police, now seems to include calling 911.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE


I love this video. Watching should be mandatory for both high schoolers and jurors.


Note the ties to Cincinnati, where in 2018 a young boy called 911 multiple times when he was trapped in a minivan seat that folded in a way he ceased trapped. The operator didn’t believe him, a cop did a cursory search after two calls even though the make and model of the van were given. The boy slowly suffocated to death.

His last words were telling the operator to tell his mom he loved her.

Makes you wonder if their system flagged his call and it wasn’t entirely the result of a completely incompetent 911 operator and cop.


This story is why everyone should have the right to proper legal representation regardless of ability to pay. Cases based on junk science should not have to be reversed on appeal. It would also help build precedent against such methods.


> everyone should have the right to proper legal representation regardless of ability to pay

Isn't that already the case?


In the U.S.? In theory; but in practice, there are a lot of problems with the system. A couple of sources, pointing out the failings and holes:

https://apnews.com/article/court-decisions-eric-holder-supre... highlights the fact that this right extends only to criminal matters, many if not most defendants don't actually receive proper representation, and are subject to political motivations.

https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/national-survey-indigent... highlights some numbers around things like most systems for indigent defense still requiring payment, like application fees or recoupment, and the lack of lawyers in public defenders offices.

Remember also that this is only the system if the court decides you "can't pay" and that's not the same thing as "can't pay without selling your house" or "can't pay without cleaning out your $1000 savings account". Judges can decide that since you're living at home your parents can afford to sell their assets to finance your defense, etc. So it's quite porous and there are people who can't afford an effective defense as we would understand but don't meet a judge's interpretation of their state's standard for indigency.


> Isn't that already the case?

In theory yes, according to the US Supreme court in Gideon vs Wainwright. [0] In practice no. Public defender programs are chronically underfunded in the United States. The problem seems to affect states regardless of the party in control. [1]

[0] https://www.oyez.org/cases/1962/155

[1] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...


> Isn't that already the case?

In spirit, perhaps. In fact, no. If you opt for court-provided representation, your defense attorney will typically have less than an hour to prep for your case -- barely long enough to get "your side of the story" and certainly not long enough to discover nuances relevant to the law. And you might even still have to pay; in Texas, for example, you're not entitled to court-appointed representation if your income is above some unspecified amount.


My brother is a public defender. He has decades of experience and is board certified in Criminal Defense. He is a good lawyer.

He tells me that something like half of his tiny department quit after the pandemic. He has a crazy number of cases to handle, there is no way he can do his full job for any of them.


The judge being surprised the FBI conducted studies concluding the technique lacks merit after having published an article about the initial promising result is a problem. Preliminary results without independent verification are notoriously unreliable.

Imagine an engineer designing something safety-critical based on a single scientific paper describing a result that hadn't been replicated elsewhere. Engineers usually don't do that, but if they do they face significant liability and risk losing their licenses.


I just learned of new federal rules of procedure that made my stomach turn.

> Like all evidence, the proponent must establish authenticity and admissibility. The issue of authenticity has been addressed in federal court with the addition of Fed. R. Evid. 902(13) and (14). Louisiana has not yet adopted similar amendments to the Louisiana Rules of Evidence.

> This rule eliminates the necessity of a foundational witness at trial. The person who makes the certification must meet Rule 602 (personal knowledge) and Rule 702 (scientific or specialized knowledge) and Rule 901(b)(9) requiring explanation of how the process or system that generated the electronic record produces reliable and accurate results.

> With a human expert, if you want to challenge the opinion, you file a motion in limine which allows you to put on evidence prior to trial to contest the expert's qualifications to give the opinion or the expert's methodology. > The proponent of the AI opinion will have to establish that the Al algorithm produces accurate results. If the proponent cannot do that, then the evidence is unreliable. Unreliable evidence is not relevant.

[...]

> At the end of the day, if the court finds the Al opinion authentic, then it will be admitted in evidence and the opponent will not be able to cross examine the opinion at trial.

Gosh, the only thing I can think of that might save us is challenging the features that become inputs into the models - however, with GPT-4's example, as those increase to inhumane sizes, I wonder if even that will remain an effective strategy.

Source: Louisiana Bar Association Journal


The field of law enforcement is rife with bad science and even misapplied science.

Television does not help. Copaganda shows like Bones, NCIS, CSI, The Mentalist, Criminal Minds, and others give a very unrealistic portrayal of what technology and people are capable of. And it's become the standard that is expected. And gives the illusion that if there is a "process", it must be accurate. That if the answer is precise, it is accurate.


This reminds me of a friend who stated that when you call 911, you should ask for police/fire/ambulance, give your name and address and then put the phone down. I thought he was overly paranoid but I guess not.


There's a lot of awful stuff in here, but as a non American, this really blows my mind:

> Prosecutors charged the mother with second-degree murder, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. She took a plea deal — without admitting guilt — that resulted in a manslaughter conviction and she served about two years. “We would never have known the truth,” Garland wrote to Harpster, “if it hadn’t been for your book and your excellent training.”

The possibilities here are:

1. This women was innocent, her child died, and she spent 2 years in prison, or 2. This woman was guilty of murder and only spent 2 years in prison.

Either way, surely this concept of a "plea deal" is a broken one that doesn't lead in any way to justice?


How could junk science end up being implemented? Who oversees this stuff?


A big criticism that I have heard from "defund the police" folks is that a lot of police departments across the country have more money than sense and accountability. If you are inclined to believe this statement, it is inevitable that they are, in best case, swindled by hucksters selling snake oil, and in worst case, are dabbling in corruption to enrich themselves.


If you have a big wallet and someone telling you that if you don't spend all of that money this paycheck you'll get less next paycheck, then you'll buy snake oil if you have to just to make sure next week you still get paid the same.


NIST apparently does some work in the field, although they don’t have oversight authority. They recently discovered that bite mark analysis is worthless: https://www.nist.gov/spo/forensic-science-program/bitemark-a...


NIST has some very good reasons not to be a regulatory agency. They depend on a lot of cooperation with industry to build some very high tech devices.


No one, really, except for the judge (who has training in law, not science).


We don’t have to appoint lawyers to the bench, but it’s a hard addiction to shake off.

(I’d argue we shouldn’t, after all, anyone, including judges, can hire out for legal advice as required)


A common test for these methods is that they undergo peer review and are reasonably accepted.

Many of them DID pass peer review. They had papers written on how well they work.

Obviously something in that peer review process has (yet again) led us to junk science.


Peer review is just people looking at a report and deciding whether or not your conclusions and findings are based on the data you reported.

What it's not is replication or in any way an indication that the original research was independent. The person reviewing your report has no way to know if your data is totally fabricated or not unless they try to replicate your study.


This example was already being used in cases before the original study was even published for exploratory review.


I recall reading similarly-alarming articles about other police junk science in the US. For example, Shot Spotter:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27959755

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258854

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31958201

I believe I have read similar about drug sniffing dogs and certain forms of field drug testing.

There appears to be no sufficient mechanism for preventing junk science from tainting the process of justice.


Humans didn't change at all since tests like cruentation were an accepted method.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruentation

Fortunately it appears ai will soon enough act as a modern version of God's judgment, which while still not perfect, should be significantly better than some random cop's gut feeling.


I may just be cynical, but I don't see any reason why AI judgement won't be the next cruentation. AI decisions are based purely on learned biases, which may be effectively equivalent to gut feelings. There will be many opportunities for AI-determined suspicions to be used as a determination of guilt in lieu of real evidence.

"The AI finds it likely that you committed the murder."

It doesn't have to be this way, but given the perpetual misunderstanding and misapplication of AI, I think it's likely to happen anyway.


Before that happens, the whole world would need to be under continual observation. Then we would have to realize that it always takes more people to observe the people than there are people to observe, and turn the eternal watch over to AI.

Then the AI wouldn't be saying, "I think it's likely you did this", it would be saying, "Here's the video of you doing this".


> Before that happens, the whole world would need to be under continual observation. Then we would have to realize that it always takes more people to observe the people than there are people to observe, and turn the eternal watch over to AI.

> Then the AI wouldn't be saying, "I think it's likely you did this", it would be saying, "Here's the video of you doing this".

Reality of what this video shows will be is much closer to: " we have some video(we are not sure if AI properly reconstructed low quality recording and then matched person accused of crime, example: changing letters in photocopies), does video shows real crime or it only looks like a crime from certain angle, it search data for crimes not for proofs of innocence. After all what stops people behind AI from over representing as criminals people with evil mustaches (consciously or not, doesn't matter), so at start it assigns them a higher score?


> Before that happens, the whole world would need to be under continual observation.

I don't see any reason that is a necessary precondition for an evolving reliance on AI judgement. Though obviously there are potential interactions between surveillance ubiquity and that.

> Then the AI wouldn't be saying, "I think it's likely you did this", it would be saying, "Here's the video of you doing this".

Crimes tend to have elements that cannot be shown on a video, but which might be deemed likely based on a video, like knowledge and intent.

So, it will exactly be “I think oy is likely that you did this”.


I don't know how I would feel about allowing AI to put humans in prison without incontrovertible proof.

Any black box thing, (that is, any system where raw data comes in and a result comes out without everyone involved fully understanding the process) should not have the authority to take a human's freedom from them of its own volition.

I would much rather utilize them as a Sherlock whose job is to assemble the evidence that is available and state their conclusions to the jury, who could then make their decision based off of the evidence.


That'll be the same thing though?

The ai creates a video animating the way it thinks you did it, which adds a couple extra legs and an extra eye, but the jury is already biased to think the defendant is likely to have extra eyes and legs, so they accept the ais description


Verdicts should have references to evidence classes that are based on a scientific method. If that evidence class is revealed to be junk science, all cases with that class, should be automatically repopened.




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