Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

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The phrasing of this rubs me the wrong way -- I get the feeling that you're more afraid of guilty people being presumed innocent than you are of innocent people being framed by deepfakes.

Our justice system worked for a very long time in an environment where cell phones didn't exist, where cities weren't covered end-to-end in CCTV cameras, and our courts were able to do a decent job of protecting the innocent and putting away the bad guys. Distrust of video evidence only makes us revert back 30 years to when we weren't so monitored. It's something that we can survive. On the other hand, if we don't see an outright rejection of deepfakes in our courts, we're going to see it used as a political weapon. We can survive the former, but not the latter.

Unfortunately, I don't see it working out that way. Once courts and police get their hands on a new technology and it becomes sufficiently ingrained, it doesn't matter how little sense it makes. Drug dogs are bullshit, but they're still everywhere. [1] DNA evidence can be synthesized and planted, but it's the gold standard in terms of courtroom evidence. [2]

Given all of this, I don't have a lot of faith in our justice system getting deepfakes right, and that worries me a lot more than guilty people being presumed innocent.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/05/supreme-c...

[2]: Good reason to avoid giving your DNA to 23andMe or to the state. Unfortunately, both my parents did 23andMe, so I'm screwed regardless. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/science/18dna.html

The track record of the justice system has been extremely mixed for many, and downright awful for minorities. DNA testing has been absolutely crucial in the last 30 - 40 years for undoing some of the damage the justice system caused before DNA testing was adequately available. There is no comfort found in regressing backwards to where forensic science becomes easily dismissible, and we're reliant on who can buy the most prestigious expert witness to testify for them.

Courts and police have still done vastly more for minorities than against them.

That's not really comforting to the minority people whose lives were ruined by them.

> That's not really comforting to the minority people whose lives were ruined by them.

Actually, it probably is somewhat. I hate paying money but that my taxes go to useful things makes it bearable. I hate sucking up to a guy in a uniform but that he also arrests murderers makes it less infuriating.

But moreover, that's not the issue brought up originally, which was net damage to a group. The implication was that the justice system harmed minorities and as a group that's simply not true.

Also, the language used is trying to borrow outrage. Harmed minorities? No, harmed the poor. Many of whom were minorities. But there are rich racial minorities too.

You are trying to dilute the impact the racist history of US has had on minorities via the justice system. Justice and policing policies disproportionately target minorities. Sure the poor are affected by lack of proper representation, but minority populations also happen to be disproportionately affected by poverty. Stop and frisk, racial profiling, less lenient prosecutory discretion, mandatory minimum sentencing, and the War on Drugs all disproportionately impact minority groups compared to Caucasians[1]. If you just think we need to solve the poverty problem, a significant part of that problem is rooted in systemic racism too.

Per the Innocence Project, 70% of the cases they have exonerated have been of a minority group, and often these cases involved underlying racial prejudice to railroad an innocent person into a long-term prison sentence or death.[2]

>As of November 2019, 367 people previously convicted of serious crimes in the United States had been exonerated by DNA testing since 1989, 21 of whom had been sentenced to death.[9] Almost all (99%) of the wrongful convictions were males,[19] with minority groups constituting approximately 70% (61% African American and 8% Latino).

1.https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/un-report-on-...

2.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence_Project#Overturned_c...

So the largest discrepancy from proportions in the US population is the overwhelming skew in favor of males (99%) - are they “minorities” too?

If the problem is racism, in a country where sexism against women is said to be a major problem, why would there be a 99:1 preponderance of men? Are the racists also biased in favor of women and against men?

This sounds like apples v. oranges.

Are males a minority group? No, technically not, since sex split is about 50/50. Is the high preponderance of men ending up in prison concerning? Yes. Frankly our high incarceration rates for non-violent crimes is extremely concerning. Does this somehow invalidate the problems brought up around female equality? Absolutely not. I also believe there is probably additional negative bias towards African-American males because of racist tropes.

Also the 99% figure was from the Innocence Project, Google brings up Federal Bureau of Prisons stat suggesting active incarceration is closer to 93% male, 7% female. Still concerning.

> You are trying to dilute the impact the racist history of US has had on minorities via the justice system.

Hasn't anyone told you that you learn more with questions than assertions?

No. I'm saying that the language used is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Regardless of all the stuff you mentioned, which is true, the system is still a benefit.

You should not go out of your way to further weaken trust in the system that has benefitted those minorities you mention more than it has hurt them. Especially as you are presumably not those groups, you should be careful not to wreck what they have. (You may not be aware, but white 'progressives' often speak for people of color. Their messages sound like ones of support initially, but because these people are often merely social signaling the rhetoric can often prove harmful to people who have to live with it.)

> [...] all disproportionately impact minority groups compared to Caucasians

Some minorities, yes. Others, no. Deeply troubling to the white v black narrative is that Nigerian immigrants often do very well in the USA, even when Americans don't know if they're american-descendants-of-slavery or not.

But yes, ADoS do have it rough. If you want to support someone though, vague "minorities" is not how you do it.

> Per the Innocence Project, 70% of the cases

You can't use that stat in that way, presumably they picked the most egregious cases which would be the poorest, etc.

I think you're saying minorities are better off with a justice system than without. Maybe everyone is technically better off with a justice system, than with something like vigilante justice, but the US has always had some level of justice system even during slavery. Was it really to their benefit at that time? Can we say things have improved, yes, very slowly, but systemic racism still exists.

>You can't use that stat in that way, presumably they picked the most egregious cases which would be the poorest, etc.

No, you cannot just ignore ingrained racism within the judicial system from day one as simply being a class issue. You can read more from the National Registry of Exonerations about racial bias in exonerated cases[1].

1. http://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Race_...

I don't think the history regarding how courts (and juries) handled eyewitness testimony, is all that different from how they handle DNA evidence. It's regarded as far more reliable than it is.

>Drug dogs are bullshit, but they're still everywhere. [1]

Just because some abuse them and have no proper training doesn't mean they are fake. You clearly have never seen a police dog work. They are able to find dead people, drugs, etc. that is at the bottom of the sea or follow the path the target took while inside a car. What is BS is the "police" and justice system in the US.

This is a misunderstanding of why "drug dogs are bullshit".

Yes, dogs are capable of sniffing out people, animals, and substances. This has been made use of for centuries.

Dogs are also capable of "hitting" on the trunk of a car, just because they guess that their master wants to look inside it. Plenty of evidence that this happens all the time.

Which undermines the right protecting against unreasonable search and seizure. All you have to do is be the wrong color, or driving in a "suspicious" way (which means whatever police want it to mean), and they can bring a K9 by, the dog will dutifully point at the trunk, and the cops get their search.

It's no different from the "I smelled pot" routine: there aren't any penalties to the police for doing an "I smelled pot" search and not finding cannabis, and there are no consequences for a K9 'hitting' on a trunk which turns out to have nothing more interesting than a gym bag.

That is a very convoluted way of stating that police dog handlers in the US are as bad as the rest of the US police. It is not that "drug dogs are BS" but that "US police have a huge problem and it includes their use of drug dogs".

I love dogs, I also used to love weed. I had planned a trip to a far away country for the New year. I left my country of origin on a short flyover to meet with friends and catch main flight to destination. I was absolutly smashed from smoking 2 joints before getting on the plane (outside the main door of the airport). When I arrived I walked through bagage area, with no baggage to collect as it was going straight to the final destination. I spied a dog, and made a beeline to say hello. I had fun playing with the dog and just as I was walking away I could feel this burning feeling that someone was giving me the evil eye. I turned around and followed the dogs lead to the owner, who was a fair way away, and dressed in a high-vis jacket. I continued on without thinking about it, until i started to think about it. Lets just say the next couple of hours waiting for my friends was not so pleasant. (I wasnt carrying anything, but still).

drug dogs usefulness to law enforcement, almost exclusively, are as machines to manufacture probable cause on command. As this is how they’re used, “bullshit” is far too kind a descriptor.

In the US perhaps.

Just because one drug dog might actually work doesn't mean that, on average, they and their handlers are performing to standard sufficient for probable cause.

I'm aware that there are huge problems with police training and integrity in the US but that isn't a problem with drug dogs. That is a problem with the training and integrity of their handlers.

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