by Jordan Arizmendi
Move over Terminator, the newest crop of law enforcement agents are New York City’s futuristic robots that have been given the beat of Times Square as well as the city subways.
This is not the first time that NYPD has allowed robots to perform gritty police work. In 2021, the Boston Dynamic DigiDog, galloped around the city on its four metallic legs in pursuit of criminal violations. However, back then, the DigiDog really creeped out a lot of New Yorkers, so the robotic canines were suspended from duty.
The latest robotic cops on the beat are the K5 Autonomous Security Robot that is built by Knightscope. This egg-shaped robot, nicknamed “SnitchBOT” is packed with a dozen microphones, a 360-degree camera, and a license-plate reader.
Anyone brazen enough to defile, destroy, or damage the robots will be charged with assaulting an officer. The technology comes at a hefty price – “SnitchBOT” costs $12,250 for a seven-month rental. The money will be paid with NYPD forfeiture funds.
Those that may be nervous about machine’s destruction of man will breathe a sigh of relief once they learn that these new additions to the NYPD do not carry weapons. Their sole ...
by Jordan Arizmendi
At the end of June 2023, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte signed a bill, Senate Bill 397 (“SB397”) that will ban warrantless facial recognition surveillance, generally. According to the law, the exceptions that would permit a law enforcement agency to perform a facial recognition search include: if probable cause exists that an unknown individual in an image has committed a crime, is a victim of a crime, or is a witness to a serious crime; might be a local missing person; or if law enforcement needs to identify a corpse.
SB397 bans “the monitoring of public places or third-party image sets using facial recognition technology for facial identification to match faces with a prepopulated list of face images. The term includes but is not limited to scanning stored video footage to identify faces in the stored data, real-time scanning of video surveillance to identify passing by the cameras, and passively monitoring video footage using facial recognition technology for general surveillance purposes without a particularized suspicion of a specific target.”
As a result of SB397, law enforcement will need to get a warrant, before requesting a facial recognition search in the investigation of a serious crime. The lone exception ...
by Jordan Arizmendi
The most exonerations in one year occurred in 2022. According to the Nation Registry of Exonerations’ 2022 Annual Report, the 233 people exonerated in 2022 lost an average of 9.6 years of their life as a result of their wrongful incarceration.
Alarmingly but not shocking, the report detailed that at least 195 of the 233 exonerations claimed official misconduct to be the cause of their wrongful imprisonment. In addition, 59% of the 233 exonerations included wrongful convictions when no actual crime had even occurred – child sex abuse, drug possession, murder, for example.
Of the 233 exonerations, 81 were for homicide charges; 16 were for sexual assault, 12 of those included children; 20 were for violent crimes other than homicides or sexual assault, such as robbery or attempted murder; and 166 defendants were exonerated for non-violent crimes.
Among the exonerations, 195 were as a result of official misconduct; 54 involved mistaken witness identification; 31 were for convictions based on a false confession; 184 involved false accusations; 44 included false or misleading forensic evidence; and 56 were caused by ineffective assistance of counsel.
One interesting facet illustrated in the report’s conclusion was the sharp increase of exonerations ...
Jordan Arizmendi
The next time you arrive at a door that is equipped with a camera, as you glance into that lens, be cognizant that someone, somewhere could be analyzing your identity with facial recognition technology. Consumer Reports tested a number of security camera brands and video doorbells that offer facial recognition, such as Bosma, Blurams, Eve, Eufy, Google Nest, Logitech, Netatmo, and WeMo. Although the study concludes that such cameras are not connected to massive facial databases, hence, alone, they do not pose significant privacy concerns; however, they still can potentially invade our privacy.
The Amazon Ring Doorbell Pro, for example, interacts with Amazon Alexa to play prerecorded greetings to visitors, plus they can leave messages. However, Amazon recently admitted that there could be “emergency” instances, when police can get warrantless access to Ring devices without the owner’s permission. In that case, all it takes is a police officer’s skewed definition of the word “emergency” for them to gain access to one’s private videos. Amazon has also admitted to sharing user video with law enforcement.
Google Nest is a streaming service for all your home devices. Imagine possessing the ability to stream video content to any television, to instantly ...
by Jordan Arizmendi
On May 19, 2023, Minnesota Governor Walz (D) signed omnibus public safety bill – SF 209, which abolishes life imprisonment without parole for minors. Under the bill, juvenile life-without-parole sentences will be retroactively eliminated. In addition, all minors who were sentenced in adult court will be eligible for supervised release after at least 15 years served in prison.
Executive director of the Minnesota Justice Research Center, Justine Terrell, told the Star Tribune that “Too often, the criminal legal system just focuses on punishment. But expanding restorative outcomes and making it a priority for the system means that you’re addressing the harm that’s been caused and that people can actually move on from that harm and that helps create safe communities.”
Ninety-seven Minnesotans are serving sentences of 15 years or more for crimes committed as minors. Now, most of them are eligible for a sentencing review.
Sources: cfsy.org; eji.org
by Jordan Arizmendi
What did you eat for breakfast this morning? Most of us could answer that question – with a good deal of confidence in the accuracy of the answer. But what if, on a particular morning, instead of drinking orange juice like you do every breakfast, you drank grapefruit juice? Or what if you ate scrambled eggs instead of sunny-side-up, as you do every morning? A new study published in PLOS One – conducted by scientists in the Netherlands, U.K., and Canada – reveals that our memories are shaped, almost immediately, by our preconceptions.
The study questions the accuracy of our memories, particularly in court cases that have been decided based on the deeply flawed memory of a single account. Many of these flawed memories stem from long-term memory. Few people could recall the shoes they wore on their first day of kindergarten. Anyone claiming to remember such a trivial detail would certainly be doubted. However, the study examined the reliability of short-term memory, which is typically not similarly doubted.
“This study is unique in two ways, in our opinion. First, it explores memory for events that basically just happened, between 0.3 and 3 seconds ago. Intuitively, we ...
by Jordan Arizmendi
In a study by AIP Publishing in Physics of Fluids researchers from the University of Chicago and Iowa State University developed an explanation as to how a short-range shooter may stay completely clean of any drops of blood.
Whenever a forensics team is evaluating a crime scene, the blood back splatter caused by the “turbulent vortex ring” caused by a gunshot, will push the blood droplets back to the victim. However, according to the author of the study, Alexander Yarin, “Droplets are also deflected aside, and our predictions showed that some can even land behind the victim, even though initially they were moving from the victim toward the shooter.”
The discovery might lend credence to the inexplicable courtroom puzzle as to how a short-range shooter may stay clean of any drops of blood. According to the research, the gases that emit from a firing gun interact with blood droplets in various yet predictable ways.
“The results reveal the usefulness of multiphase flow fluid mechanics for the forensic discipline of back spatter analysis,” said Yarin.
Source: forensicmag.com
by Jordan Arizmendi
The Georgia Army National Guard (“GANG”) will geofence 67 different public high schools in the state, with recruiting ads targeting any phones within one mile of each of these schools. The purpose of such a campaign is to persuade our high school aged children to enlist.
The ...
by Jordan Arizmendi
After the latest confidential document leak, the Biden Administration as well as various security agencies are developing stricter methods to monitor social media sites and chatrooms. According to a senior official as well as a congressional official briefing, a change is coming in the government’s intelligence-gathering process. ...
by Jordan Arizmendi
If to err is human, how safe should we feel about an algorithm matching a criminal’s picture up against your charming portrait? Clearview AI is the latest software program that promises a near 100% accuracy in analyzing images of a face and then matching it within a ...
