[0] https://www.btp.police.uk/police-forces/british-transport-po...

Sounds like it was intended to achieve the outcome it achieved - a near zero false positive rate. If I were a betting person, I would wager the threshold for a match was set comically high.

https://www.btp.police.uk/police-forces/british-transport-po...

How many known criminals have biometrics of them in the first place?

Of the criminals that do have identifiable biometrics, do they operate in that area?

We also don't know the false negative rate. Perhaps it's very high in order to keep the false positive rate as low as possible.

These are things pulled out of thin air that could easily explain why 500,000 face scans (not people) provided no arrests/identifications.

The biggest reason probably being as you said... it was clearly marked. Honestly I would be shocked if they found a criminal dumb enough to walk past it, but not dumb enough to have yet to be caught.

My solution to this is to make every ALPR database openly and publicly searchable. It solves every problem with them today.

Government abuse? Well now the people can find out where all the politicans are.

False positives? the data is right there. go ham.

Oh no now the police say THEY dont want to be tracked??? Problem almost solves itself.

Perhaps, but not the way Flock does it. Transparency, oversight, controls - all essentially just missing.

"Disruption" to these people means "try to sell the most legally questionable service possible until we get slapped down by the society we're trying to extract money from."

Why should it matter if you are a 63yo grandmom or pastor?

The public perception of crime is persistently incorrect for many if not most people and this incorrect, emotional rather than evidence-based view of the world is unfortunately what drives political pressure.

What exactly have they stopped?

Unless this happened a second time, it wasn't really reported on much until after it blew up on social media.

Who's the "we" in this sentence? The people who want to keep cities crime-ridden? And why does your opinion matter more than that of the public? I thought these "we" were pro-democracy?

As I said, machine learning to take all these pointers into perspective.

- Many perpetrators are committing crimes with alcohol and drug impairments, mental disabilities, and as "crimes of passion". You could point 1000 cameras at the scene of the crime and many perpetrators are not going to notice nor care about the cameras. Unfortunately for surveillance camera proponents it's typically the crimes most warranting prevention and investigation (e.g. crimes such as assault) that are impacted least by surveillance cameras. Surveillance cameras instead have been found to have some deterrent effect on minor property crimes (e.g. theft of bicycles or cars) but whether the state is going to invest the resources into investigating and convicting someone who stole a <$1000 bicycle is questionable especially when insurance exists and the onus can then be placed back on property owners to do more to secure their property from thieves.

- Perpetrators were being convicted without use of surveillance cameras and can continue to be convicted without use of surveillance cameras. There may be some argument that surveillance cameras help reduce the cost of getting a conviction (e.g. less evidence needing to be captured?) but not much support to the idea that conviction rates are higher. Quite often the courts, corrections system, government (for funding), etc will push back for a number of reasons--lack of funding for courts to hear minor cases, lack of funding for correction systems, correction systems being found in their current state of funding to have adverse impacts on future criminality, etc.

- The cost-benefit of operating surveillance cameras versus the cost-benefit of spending on other areas of policing (or just public spending in areas such as education and welfare) is hotly debated. Total cost of ownership for each surveillance camera is typically a lot more than people may expect, particularly due to the labour cost of reviewing and processing stored surveillance camera footage. There are of course all the other obvious costs too--camera equipment every X years, poles, cabinets, electricity conduit installation, data cable conduit installation, wireless repeater installation including leases, backhaul data costs, data centre hosting costs, labour costs for support/operations staff--none of this is cheap. What if this same funding was instead invested in other programs--would there also be reduced crime levels some years in the future?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-circuit_television#Crim...

Also, clicking through, you can see the whole report is some panglossian delusion aimed at making Reform supporters look bad.

There is an out-of-hell card you can get if you pay your dues to the local enforcement branch (before you die, they need today’s money not after life checks)

> "God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary."

> "The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment."

> "The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization."

> "The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning."

> "God was a dream of good government."

> "You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands."

- Morpheus ( Deus Ex, 2000)