zlacker

>>longde+(OP)
I’m not American, but isn’t the police about the only people you should ever trust (if any) with facial-recognition technology?

If you can’t trust your police with it, then there is something fundamentally wrong with your society.

>>moksly+P8
You got it in one: we don't trust our police with it, and there is something fundamentally wrong with society. That is why there have been calls to radically re-think, or even eliminate, policing in the US.

This announcement coincides with protests against police brutality, at which many police have behaved brutally. That was sparked by an outright homicide by a police officer, captured on video, of a man who was subdued and presented no threat -- while other police officers watched, and many others have subsequently attempted to justify.

The "something fundamentally wrong" is very complex and subject to genuine debate, but it's not subject to debate that whatever it is, people don't trust the police.

>>jfenge+ha
It's less complex if you look at all these problems as symptoms. At the core is the racism. The gratuitous brutality, the lying, the planting of evidence, the us-versus-them attitude, the lawlessness, the replacement of the American flag with a Thin Blue Line flag, all of that could never have gotten so bad if racism wasn't at the core driving everything else.

>>Lendal+Ad
It's more than racism. There are plenty of cases where police brutality was exercised against "white" people. There's a consistent theme of police using violent force as a first resort rather than a last resort. Police are armed to the teeth and trained to preemptively strike at the faintest sign of trouble.

There's a gif that humorously demonstrates this mentality [1] and shows a police officer instinctively pepper spraying the air around him in response to falling down, even though there's no one around him.

Personally, I blame the laws & culture that encourage excessive civilian gun ownership. The common excuse for preemptive police brutality is the fear that a civilian could be reaching for a gun which puts the officer's life in danger. Without guns, police have no excuse to strike preemptively and it'd be much easier to gain political support for de-arming the police.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/mx6faSk.gifv