[Air-L] facial recognition software

Barry Wellman wellman at chass.utoronto.ca
Thu Jul 15 07:28:39 PDT 2010


In very early July, the G20 met in Toronto. (Never let this circus come to 
your town.)

As such, there was the inevitable demonstrations -- mostly peaceful but 
some violent -- and the inevitable police overreaction. I've heard 
credible reports of untended broken arm, etc.

The usual investigations are taking place.

The police are now talking about using facial recognition software to 
identify vandals. (Seems they grabbed 1K of the wrong people at the time.)

One of the most solid areas of research by my mentor Charles Tilly [RIP] 
is that historically the police harm more people than vice-versa.

I've just written to one of the investigating units that they use facial 
recognition software to identify the police who may have attacked 
civilians without provocation. After all, the police already have photos 
of their own officers on file.


  Barry Wellman
  _______________________________________________________________________

   S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC               NetLab Director
   Department of Sociology                  725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388
   University of Toronto   Toronto Canada M5S 2J4   twitter:barrywellman
   http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman             fax:+1-416-978-3963
   Updating history:      http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php
  _______________________________________________________________________




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