Enshittification of Policing

Policing, especially in the United States, has developed a reputation for cruelty in the last decade or two. This is largely due to acts of brutality and outright murder combined with a justice system that often shields cops from liability. Despite promises by politicians to fix this issue, the problem has only gotten worse. Now that cruelty is being enhanced by reliance on online services. Effectively policing is suffering from enshittification.

The first story involved a man arrested for attempted kidnapping of a child. The problem is he was nowhere near the scene at the time of the crime. The only "evidence" against him was a facial recognition match by an AI, which investigators blindly followed:

When security footage at a local McDonald's captured a man trying to get a young, unaccompanied girl to leave with him, Jacksonville Beach police relied on software that flagged Robert Dillon as a 93 per cent match for the suspect.

In reality, Dillon lived in Fort Myers, more than 300 miles away, and told investigators he had never visited Jacksonville Beach in his life, leading prosecutors to drop all charges and dismiss the case following the August 2024 incident.

He's suing and I hope he gets a huge payout. However, lawsuits don't punished government agencies because the people in those agencies don't pay: the taxpayers do. But I digress.

Leaving Florida, let's travel to San Diego:

San Diego police had a description of the Alfa Romeo car he was riding in and a witness who identified him during a curbside lineup as the man who brandished a handgun in Golden Hill. They had also checked the city’s automatic license plate camera system, run by the private company Flock, and got a “hit,” substantiating the claim.

The problem, says attorney Alex Coolman, was that Parra was five miles away from Golden Hill at the time of the crime, and the so-called hit from the license plate reader was captured before any police pursuit began.

The best part?

Despite the signs pointing to it being a different Alfa Romeo, police arrested Beltran and Parra.

Despite the evidence indicating that the Flock system was incorrect, police blindly followed it instead of evidence or common sense. What can you expect when courts have ruled that police candidates can be rejected for being too smart?

These aren't isolated stories. Police are making a habit of arresting innocent people based on faulty facial recognition technology alone:

What happened to Ms. Williams is outrageous and is unfortunately a predictable consequence of police using facial recognition technology. At least thirteen other people are publicly known to have been wrongfully arrested by U.S. police because of reliance on erroneous facial recognition results:

Historically the consequences of enshittification haven't been harmful in a meaningful way. Facebook stopped giving a sequential timeline of posts so it could better manipulate the posts you see. Google's search results are becoming increasingly useless. Amazon increasingly hides high-quality products behind a wall of cheap crap made by companies whose names are an alphabet soup of letters but pay for sponsored spots. Reddit cut off third-party clients. The list goes on. None of these resulted in life altering consequences.

Police relying on faulty technologies such as facial recognition systems, automatic license plate scanners, etc. does result in life altering consequences though. People lose jobs because they're arrested whether they're charged or not. Having an arrest record makes getting a job harder. There's also the danger of having to interact with government agents who already have a reputation for cruelty. Your life could be ended because a facial recognition system erroneously lists you as a suspect and an especially trigger happy officer is sent to arrest you.

As I mentioned yesterday, stupid people use technology stupidly. The examples of false arrests in this post wouldn't have happened if the cops involved looked at the evidence and used a bit of common sense. But they blindly followed the technology instead. This should come as no surprise since we see this time and time again. People happily hand over the task of thinking to AI. Police are human so it should come as no surprise that they're behaving exactly as most humans do when giving this technology.

To quote Blank Reg from Max Headroom, "Now remember when we said there was no future? Well, this is it."