I suspect many of the opponents of the use of facial recognition technology (but perhaps not all of them) are not opposed to the enforcement of criminal codes,but rather very skeptical that governments can be trusted with such tools. Considering the already highly intrusive surveillance state apparatus that exists in the five eyes countries - the thought of adding in facial recognition technology is quit terrifying.
With cameras everywhere this could give you a capacity to track where everyone is at any moment - especially if everyone is installing doorbell cameras etc whose corporate suppliers are likely to bend to rubber stamped warrants or make deals with the NSA to further government surveillance.
I broadly agree , but I think this piece’s main weakness is that it’s written against the backdrop of Twitter crazies who oppose law enforcement. Thus it doesn’t address the concerns of normal people who instead prioritize the well being of the average, law abiding citizen. Us normies are all for catching (and punishing !) criminals , but we have other concerns about expanding police powers. How do you make sure innocent people are not falsely accused? How do you balance these real needs with privacy concerns (e.g. do we allow any and every cop unmonitored access to the most powerful facial recognition tech?). In short, in a healthy democracy we should always take pause before giving the government new powers. Ultimately, as often, we may conclude with a sigh that giving this power is a necessary evil, but we may want to think about adding some checks for reassurance. I wish MY would have addressed these mainstream concerns.
I think we need to talk about the elephant in the room: if catching criminals is good, it will involve catching a disproportionate number of black men.
Progressives don't like enforcing crime because it will target black people much more commonly. If we use facial recognition software, or make more extensive use of DNA databases, they will be used much more commonly against black men. Of course, if these tools ultimately reduce mass incarceration while reducing crime, then everyone is better off, including the black men who would ultimately end up going to prison. But progressives will fight these measure tooth and nail. Expect articles in Vox about racially biased facial recognition, for example.
Liberals would be better off talking about this stuff, just as conservatives would be better off talking about a coherent health care policy.
Overall I agree with your approach. Less harsh sentences combined with a higher likelihood of getting caught if you commit a crime is the right way to go.
I think that increased survaillance is a reasonable punishment for committing a crime (and less cruel punishment than incarceration). However, I think it's worth discussing limits of surveillance. People who don't commit crimes rightly don't want to live in a surveillance state (like China) and are rightly concerned about issues of privacy and government control of daily life. So where do we draw the line? (I ask this as a genuine question, not a rhetorical one...as with most things, I'm sure there's a reasonable line to be drawn, and that those who use it as a rhetorical question usually are suffering from a slippery slope fallacy).
There’s an interesting tension in Matt’s thinking. He has talked about keeping things like prostitution and cocaine formally illegal but not enforcing such laws vigorously. The idea is to stigmatize and reduce such conduct without oodles of caging. Yet he also argues that swift and likely punishment is the best deterrent.
The basic problem is that a system designed to stamp out murder and robbery has been pressed into service to reduce vice crimes. This means that resources devoted to vice suppression inevitably come out of appropriations and manpower tasked to prevent violent crimes. At a typical felony arraignment calendar in Georgia, a third of the people are accused of victimless crimes. That’s a real problem when getting a fairly simple armed robbery case to trial takes over a year.
Punishing vice through civil penalties (possibly a portion of the offenders wealth/income) would be much better
One of the craziest articles I've read in recent years was an Atlantic piece arguing that it was bad that people were using Ring cameras to catch porch pirates. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/stealing-amazon-packages-age-nextdoor/598156/ Notably, the article isn't claiming that there is some bad second order effect, they just thought it was unfair that people who were minding their own business, stealing packages were getting arrested for it. I thought it was nuts. There are lots of things wrong with the criminal justice system, but arresting people for actually stealing isn't one of them.
Sure- so long as it applies to LEOs too. My philosophy is that if you want to be licensed by the state to do violence on its behalf, you're also subject to a much higher bar for conduct. Felons have to give their DNA samples? No problem- also, every single law enforcement officer should as well. (It would have caught the Golden State Killer much earlier!) Parolees are surveilled more heavily? Sounds good- and also let's make sure every single cop in America wears a body camera (Mass state troopers still don't, last time I checked), that they have to be on *at all times*, and that the footage is immediately owned & stored by a completely different government body. No warrant required to start an investigation for bad conduct, by becoming a cop you agree that your conduct is filmed 24/7/365 on duty. Every cop's face should be photographed and added to a facial recognition DB, so that they can be instantly IDed when they commit crimes in public.
LEOs should be required to testify against each other as a condition of employment or having a pension. Do you know of a fellow officer committing a crime on the job? You should be *required* to testify against them, on pain of possible arrest and losing your pension. Perjury on official paperwork should be publicly prosecuted. All LEO internal docs (emails, etc.) should be immediately FOIA-subject.
I'm pro law & order! Let's apply law and order to an organized gang well known for carrying out brutal crimes and then concealing them, the government
From law enforcement to privacy to free speech and more, our policy mental models haven't caught up with or internalized the sea change in the facts of the world -- that we now live in a digital panopticon, where, like it or not, it's trivially easy to reconstruct what anyone was doing or saying, and where, from a collection of mostly privately owned but also public databases. Our mental models in these areas are still resisting accepting this fact, rather than accepting it as a given and the starting point that we should work with and use. For example, in a world of total surveillance and perfect enforcement, the more salient question about criminal laws become what they prohibit and what would be a reasonable (nearly certain) punishment. That's a different mentality than the "innocent until proven guilty"/"catch me if you can" crime deterrence model we've long had, a lottery model of very strict laws with draconian penalties, but poorly enforced.
Punishment is a wonderful thing. Not excessive punishment (definitionally bad) nor wrongful conviction (which isn’t punishment at all), but punishment fitting the crime, exacted by the state, after due process. It’s important for a basic moral reason: if someone has done wrong they should suffer the consequences. It’s also critical for a social reason. One of the key advances in the very existence of the state is the social contract in which individuals, families (and tribes/clans etc) surrender their claims to personal vendetta, even against the most heinous wrongs, and in return the state takes the responsibility to seek out and exact retribution on their behalf. This is hugely beneficial to society for a myriad of reasons. But we must not forget the hard basis of it all. The state has taken up the office of exact “vengeance” on our behalf. Thus punishment is an end in itself. Yes, we want to prevent recidivism. And yes, we want to deter others. But these are *additional* goals. They do not replace the basic point of punishment. So let’s not present punishment and enforcement as a zero sum game. In a well functioning society we have low crime rates, criminals are very likely to get caught, and then they are likely to get convicted and punished appropriately for the crimes they’ve committed. Its a sad state of affairs that MY feels the need to justify the idea of better enforcement per se, and that he presents laxer punishment as a carrot. Excessive punishment should never be tolerated, regardless of enforcement levels, nor should lax punishment.
I agree. And one of the most immediate things one could do to implement it is move traffic enforcement and public nuisance events to non "police" officers (and to technology, including enlisting citizens to record parking infractions) so as to let "police" officers focus on crime deterrence. apprehension of suspects, and provision of evidence for prosecution.
As I've said repeatedly in these comments the fundamental problem here is that we are over-criminalized and under-enforced
That is to say that our criminal code includes vast amounts of nannystate, social engineering horseshit like vice taxes and pretextual offenses and victimless crimes and municipal revenue generators that are not rightly criminal that create toxic incentives and vast opportunity for oppressive, discriminatory, corrupt and ineffectual enforcement.
We are also obviously under-enforced in that we don't reliably catch murderers and car thieves or intervene when some addict is ransacking the CVS, largely because policing primarily does those other things.
The problem with Matt's vast surveillance state is that he's regularly shown that he thinks the technocratic, nannystate, social engineering stuff is good actually. As long as people are committed to using the criminal code to manipulate the law abiding, instead of to reliably prevent and punish crime this sort of proposal should be opposed, tooth and nail, by anyone who values a free, pluralistic society. The threat posed by Matt's preference here is vast and while I agree that it offers effective enforcement opportunities, so long as the guardrails on WHAT these powers might be called upon to enforce are so obviously compromised it cannot be allowed.
**PUBLIC** surveillance cameras, i.e. covering public spaces, are a good thing. The more of them the better. Nobody has a reasonable expectation of privacy in public.
Another way to think about it: if it would be OK for a cop to stand and look in the same direction as the camera, there's no privacy objection.
A criminologist friend of mine told me years ago that it is the odds of getting caught that had a demonstrated deterrent effect, not the consequences of getting caught. He was right.
Like most, I’m all in favor of catching more criminals but as things currently stand, that may not do much. In many areas, those caught for property crimes and even some assault and battery charges are out the same day they are caught (or the next). Prosecutors and police have given lower priority to such crimes due to various reasons, some political (requiring bail exacerbates the disproportionate racial effect) but also because of the sheer volume of such cases. There simply aren’t enough jail cells, guards, prosecutors or judges to increase the certainty of prosecution and conviction. Using all the technology that might lead to more arrests won’t necessarily result in increasing the deterrent effect of prosecution, conviction and incarceration. Unfortunately, bringing down crime rates is going to be much more difficult than taking DNA samples and enhancing surveillance.
Assuming criminal behavior is rationally motivated, increased apprehension ought to reduce crime by reducing the net benefit of the activity. However a substantial portion of crime is non-rational as a consequence of substance abuse among other things so cost-benefit calculations are irrelevant.
The bigger issue for me is that a pervasive surveillance society tied to facial recognition is subject to horrifying abuse. C.f. Xi's China. It is also true the the UK has had a pervasive CCT network without sliding into fascism. But the potential for abuse is clear. The only contemporary Republican whom I might trust with such a system is Mit Romney. There are also many Democratic officials who couldn't be trusted with it.
The best way to end mass incarceration is to catch more criminals
I suspect many of the opponents of the use of facial recognition technology (but perhaps not all of them) are not opposed to the enforcement of criminal codes,but rather very skeptical that governments can be trusted with such tools. Considering the already highly intrusive surveillance state apparatus that exists in the five eyes countries - the thought of adding in facial recognition technology is quit terrifying.
With cameras everywhere this could give you a capacity to track where everyone is at any moment - especially if everyone is installing doorbell cameras etc whose corporate suppliers are likely to bend to rubber stamped warrants or make deals with the NSA to further government surveillance.
I broadly agree , but I think this piece’s main weakness is that it’s written against the backdrop of Twitter crazies who oppose law enforcement. Thus it doesn’t address the concerns of normal people who instead prioritize the well being of the average, law abiding citizen. Us normies are all for catching (and punishing !) criminals , but we have other concerns about expanding police powers. How do you make sure innocent people are not falsely accused? How do you balance these real needs with privacy concerns (e.g. do we allow any and every cop unmonitored access to the most powerful facial recognition tech?). In short, in a healthy democracy we should always take pause before giving the government new powers. Ultimately, as often, we may conclude with a sigh that giving this power is a necessary evil, but we may want to think about adding some checks for reassurance. I wish MY would have addressed these mainstream concerns.
I think we need to talk about the elephant in the room: if catching criminals is good, it will involve catching a disproportionate number of black men.
Progressives don't like enforcing crime because it will target black people much more commonly. If we use facial recognition software, or make more extensive use of DNA databases, they will be used much more commonly against black men. Of course, if these tools ultimately reduce mass incarceration while reducing crime, then everyone is better off, including the black men who would ultimately end up going to prison. But progressives will fight these measure tooth and nail. Expect articles in Vox about racially biased facial recognition, for example.
Liberals would be better off talking about this stuff, just as conservatives would be better off talking about a coherent health care policy.
Overall I agree with your approach. Less harsh sentences combined with a higher likelihood of getting caught if you commit a crime is the right way to go.
I think that increased survaillance is a reasonable punishment for committing a crime (and less cruel punishment than incarceration). However, I think it's worth discussing limits of surveillance. People who don't commit crimes rightly don't want to live in a surveillance state (like China) and are rightly concerned about issues of privacy and government control of daily life. So where do we draw the line? (I ask this as a genuine question, not a rhetorical one...as with most things, I'm sure there's a reasonable line to be drawn, and that those who use it as a rhetorical question usually are suffering from a slippery slope fallacy).
There’s an interesting tension in Matt’s thinking. He has talked about keeping things like prostitution and cocaine formally illegal but not enforcing such laws vigorously. The idea is to stigmatize and reduce such conduct without oodles of caging. Yet he also argues that swift and likely punishment is the best deterrent.
The basic problem is that a system designed to stamp out murder and robbery has been pressed into service to reduce vice crimes. This means that resources devoted to vice suppression inevitably come out of appropriations and manpower tasked to prevent violent crimes. At a typical felony arraignment calendar in Georgia, a third of the people are accused of victimless crimes. That’s a real problem when getting a fairly simple armed robbery case to trial takes over a year.
Punishing vice through civil penalties (possibly a portion of the offenders wealth/income) would be much better
One of the craziest articles I've read in recent years was an Atlantic piece arguing that it was bad that people were using Ring cameras to catch porch pirates. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/stealing-amazon-packages-age-nextdoor/598156/ Notably, the article isn't claiming that there is some bad second order effect, they just thought it was unfair that people who were minding their own business, stealing packages were getting arrested for it. I thought it was nuts. There are lots of things wrong with the criminal justice system, but arresting people for actually stealing isn't one of them.
Sure- so long as it applies to LEOs too. My philosophy is that if you want to be licensed by the state to do violence on its behalf, you're also subject to a much higher bar for conduct. Felons have to give their DNA samples? No problem- also, every single law enforcement officer should as well. (It would have caught the Golden State Killer much earlier!) Parolees are surveilled more heavily? Sounds good- and also let's make sure every single cop in America wears a body camera (Mass state troopers still don't, last time I checked), that they have to be on *at all times*, and that the footage is immediately owned & stored by a completely different government body. No warrant required to start an investigation for bad conduct, by becoming a cop you agree that your conduct is filmed 24/7/365 on duty. Every cop's face should be photographed and added to a facial recognition DB, so that they can be instantly IDed when they commit crimes in public.
LEOs should be required to testify against each other as a condition of employment or having a pension. Do you know of a fellow officer committing a crime on the job? You should be *required* to testify against them, on pain of possible arrest and losing your pension. Perjury on official paperwork should be publicly prosecuted. All LEO internal docs (emails, etc.) should be immediately FOIA-subject.
I'm pro law & order! Let's apply law and order to an organized gang well known for carrying out brutal crimes and then concealing them, the government
From law enforcement to privacy to free speech and more, our policy mental models haven't caught up with or internalized the sea change in the facts of the world -- that we now live in a digital panopticon, where, like it or not, it's trivially easy to reconstruct what anyone was doing or saying, and where, from a collection of mostly privately owned but also public databases. Our mental models in these areas are still resisting accepting this fact, rather than accepting it as a given and the starting point that we should work with and use. For example, in a world of total surveillance and perfect enforcement, the more salient question about criminal laws become what they prohibit and what would be a reasonable (nearly certain) punishment. That's a different mentality than the "innocent until proven guilty"/"catch me if you can" crime deterrence model we've long had, a lottery model of very strict laws with draconian penalties, but poorly enforced.
Punishment is a wonderful thing. Not excessive punishment (definitionally bad) nor wrongful conviction (which isn’t punishment at all), but punishment fitting the crime, exacted by the state, after due process. It’s important for a basic moral reason: if someone has done wrong they should suffer the consequences. It’s also critical for a social reason. One of the key advances in the very existence of the state is the social contract in which individuals, families (and tribes/clans etc) surrender their claims to personal vendetta, even against the most heinous wrongs, and in return the state takes the responsibility to seek out and exact retribution on their behalf. This is hugely beneficial to society for a myriad of reasons. But we must not forget the hard basis of it all. The state has taken up the office of exact “vengeance” on our behalf. Thus punishment is an end in itself. Yes, we want to prevent recidivism. And yes, we want to deter others. But these are *additional* goals. They do not replace the basic point of punishment. So let’s not present punishment and enforcement as a zero sum game. In a well functioning society we have low crime rates, criminals are very likely to get caught, and then they are likely to get convicted and punished appropriately for the crimes they’ve committed. Its a sad state of affairs that MY feels the need to justify the idea of better enforcement per se, and that he presents laxer punishment as a carrot. Excessive punishment should never be tolerated, regardless of enforcement levels, nor should lax punishment.
I agree. And one of the most immediate things one could do to implement it is move traffic enforcement and public nuisance events to non "police" officers (and to technology, including enlisting citizens to record parking infractions) so as to let "police" officers focus on crime deterrence. apprehension of suspects, and provision of evidence for prosecution.
As I've said repeatedly in these comments the fundamental problem here is that we are over-criminalized and under-enforced
That is to say that our criminal code includes vast amounts of nannystate, social engineering horseshit like vice taxes and pretextual offenses and victimless crimes and municipal revenue generators that are not rightly criminal that create toxic incentives and vast opportunity for oppressive, discriminatory, corrupt and ineffectual enforcement.
We are also obviously under-enforced in that we don't reliably catch murderers and car thieves or intervene when some addict is ransacking the CVS, largely because policing primarily does those other things.
The problem with Matt's vast surveillance state is that he's regularly shown that he thinks the technocratic, nannystate, social engineering stuff is good actually. As long as people are committed to using the criminal code to manipulate the law abiding, instead of to reliably prevent and punish crime this sort of proposal should be opposed, tooth and nail, by anyone who values a free, pluralistic society. The threat posed by Matt's preference here is vast and while I agree that it offers effective enforcement opportunities, so long as the guardrails on WHAT these powers might be called upon to enforce are so obviously compromised it cannot be allowed.
**PUBLIC** surveillance cameras, i.e. covering public spaces, are a good thing. The more of them the better. Nobody has a reasonable expectation of privacy in public.
Another way to think about it: if it would be OK for a cop to stand and look in the same direction as the camera, there's no privacy objection.
I want to start off by saying that I miss Graham. I’d be quite curious to learn what he agrees and disagrees with in this article,
A criminologist friend of mine told me years ago that it is the odds of getting caught that had a demonstrated deterrent effect, not the consequences of getting caught. He was right.
Like most, I’m all in favor of catching more criminals but as things currently stand, that may not do much. In many areas, those caught for property crimes and even some assault and battery charges are out the same day they are caught (or the next). Prosecutors and police have given lower priority to such crimes due to various reasons, some political (requiring bail exacerbates the disproportionate racial effect) but also because of the sheer volume of such cases. There simply aren’t enough jail cells, guards, prosecutors or judges to increase the certainty of prosecution and conviction. Using all the technology that might lead to more arrests won’t necessarily result in increasing the deterrent effect of prosecution, conviction and incarceration. Unfortunately, bringing down crime rates is going to be much more difficult than taking DNA samples and enhancing surveillance.
Assuming criminal behavior is rationally motivated, increased apprehension ought to reduce crime by reducing the net benefit of the activity. However a substantial portion of crime is non-rational as a consequence of substance abuse among other things so cost-benefit calculations are irrelevant.
The bigger issue for me is that a pervasive surveillance society tied to facial recognition is subject to horrifying abuse. C.f. Xi's China. It is also true the the UK has had a pervasive CCT network without sliding into fascism. But the potential for abuse is clear. The only contemporary Republican whom I might trust with such a system is Mit Romney. There are also many Democratic officials who couldn't be trusted with it.