Police around the US say they're justified to run DNA-generated 3D models of faces through facial recognition tools to help crack cold cases. Everyone but the cops thinks that’s a bad idea.

For facial recognition experts and privacy advocates, the East Bay detective’s request, while dystopian, was also entirely predictable. It emphasizes the ways that, without oversight, law enforcement is able to mix and match technologies in unintended ways, using untested algorithms to single out suspects based on unknowable criteria.

  • @agent_flounder@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12•10 months ago

    Propublica did an article on that.

    https://www.propublica.org/article/understanding-junk-science-forensics-criminal-justice

    E.g.

    The reliability of bloodstain-pattern analysis has never been definitively proven or quantified, but largely due to the testimony of criminalist Herbert MacDonell, it was steadily admitted in court after court around the country in the 1970s and ’80s. MacDonell spent his career teaching weeklong “institutes” in bloodstain-pattern analysis at police departments around the country, training hundreds of officers who, in turn, trained hundreds more.

    …

    In 2009, a watershed report commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences cast doubt on the discipline, finding that “the uncertainties associated with bloodstain-pattern analysis are enormous,” and that experts’ opinions were generally “more subjective than scientific.” More than a decade later, few peer-reviewed studies exist, and research that might determine the accuracy of analysts’ findings is close to nonexistent.