“Peek-A-Boo”: The Police Can’t Wait To Get Their Hands On Augmented Reality
Now that New York City is under the rule of a socialist dictator, the “stop and frisk” method of policing, in which hundreds of thousands of citizens who brazenly walked the streets while in a state of non-whiteness were subjected to questioning, delay, and some unfriendly touching, has come to an end. But what if the cops didn’t even need to stop you to give you a virtual pat down?
Imagine this: You walk by a police officer and notice that he’s wearing a pair of odd-looking glasses, which he points in your direction. Almost instantly, a facial recognition program visible in those glasses identifies you, pulls up your file, and informs him that though you have a parking ticket you haven’t yet paid, there are no arrest warrants outstanding for you. A combination of infrared and hopefully non-cancer-causing scanning sensors tells him that you’ve got keys and change in your pockets, but nothing that looks like a gun or a knife, so he lets you pass. That may have all happened without you even noticing.
We’ve seen these kinds of things in science fiction for a while, but they’re getting very close to becoming a reality, like within-the-next decade close. Which is why it isn’t too surprising that the New York Police Department is exploring what it can do with Google Glass, to bring augmented reality to the cop on the beat. “We signed up, got a few pairs of the Google glasses, and we’re trying them out, seeing if they have any value in investigations, mostly for patrol purposes,” said one NYPD official.
There isn’t anything to be afraid of—yet. The capabilities of augmented reality for law enforcement are, at the moment, very limited. But they won’t be for long. There are no real large leaps in technology necessary to get from where we are now to where the cops would like to go—basically all you need is some steady and inevitable improvements in the sensors, the software they rely on, and the databases that integrate and process the information.
There are a couple of important things to keep in mind as this technology matures. First, law enforcement agencies are going to want them, and bad. Just imagine how much easier it would make their jobs if they could identify every person they come across as either a civilian with a clean record or a potentially dangerous criminal who needs a second look. Second, when privacy advocates raise objections, they’re going to make persuasive arguments for why they should be allowed to use the technology. One scenario they like to bring up is a cop chasing a suspect into an abandoned warehouse, whereupon she immediately sees the blueprint of the warehouse to identify possible exits, then switches to infrared to locate the suspect hiding behind a cabinet. Got him! Or, they’ll say, what about if they get a call about a suspect wielding a knife in a parking lot, they get there, scan and identify him, and learn his entire history of mental illness; then they can call in their colleagues who are trained to deal with that kind of suspect, instead of shooting him.
There are going to be controversies and lawsuits about the details, sorting out what kinds of sensors cops will be allowed to use and when. But law enforcement is almost certainly going to win the argument, first because people usually opt for safety at the expense of privacy, and second because at least parts of what the law enforcement officials claim will have genuine merit. It really will make some kinds of policing more efficient and effective. It really will catch some criminals. Getting scanned by a cop wearing augmented reality glasses as you walk by him is certainly preferable to getting slammed against a wall and frisked. And by the time we’ve fully considered whether the privacy invasion is too high a price to pay, it’ll be firmly in place and there’ll be no going back.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 7, 2014
“An Entitled, Unhinged Nightmare”: The Real Problem With Dangerous Goon Michael Grimm
New York Rep. Michael Grimm is an unstable, possibly dangerous goon. That much was obvious in the video in which he corners and threatens NY1 reporter Michael Scotto. His act may not have surprised readers of the New Yorker’s 2011 profile of Grimm, which describes the 1999 night that Grimm, brandishing a gun, terrorized a nightclub full of people in search of a man with whom he’d fought earlier. Grimm’s propensity for abusive language and ridiculous macho posturing was also well-known to New York and Washington reporters.
Grimm’s actions that night at the Caribbean Tropics nightclub in Queens would have likely put a regular citizen in jail for years. But Grimm was not a regular citizen: He was an FBI agent at the time, and thus, after an internal investigation, he received no punishment at all. (The NYPD has declined repeated requests to release public records related to the incident.)
A former political opponent of Grimm’s, Mark Murphy, shared his explanation of Grimm’s behavior with TPM’s Hunter Walker:
Mark Murphy, a Democrat who lost a House race against Grimm in 2012, spoke to TPM and said that while he has no direct evidence he believes that steroid use is responsible for multiple incidents where Grimm and a man he described as the congressman’s “bodyguard” have lost their cool.
“These guys are wrapped so tight from the steroids that they’re on, it’s insane,” Murphy said.
Murphy could be purely speculating, or passing on rumors. But it’s not a wildly far-fetched theory. Steroid use in law enforcement is nearly impossible to study, because cops operate under a quasi-state-sanctioned code of silence regarding one another’s misdeeds, but it seems pervasive, and officers are busted regularly in cities across the country. Two NYPD deputy chiefs were even caught in a steroid probe in 2007 (neither was punished). The FBI has, I think, stricter drug screening protocols than most local police departments, but agents purchasing steroids is certainly not unheard of. (Also, if baseball has taught us nothing else about steroid use, it’s taught us that it’s easier to trace the purchasing of steroids than test for their use.)
But maybe Grimm isn’t roided out. It’s quite possible that Grimm is an unhinged nightmare of toxic, entitled machismo completely without the aid of chemical enhancement. People with those sorts of personalities seem for some reason particularly drawn to careers in law enforcement. It might have something to do with being allowed to wield power over others through physical intimidation and outright violence without fear of reprisal or even societal disapproval?
Because we for some reason allow law enforcement officers to steal money, raid homes, shoot pets and sometimes wave guns around in nightclubs without going to prison. Cops routinely plant drugs on suspects and lie about it in court. We indulge the widespread law enforcement belief that they are soldiers in a “war on crime,” and that the danger and importance of their mission justifies excessive force and rule-bending.
The FBI’s rule-bending is admittedly more sophisticated than that of your average urban police force. The bureau specializes in convincing nitwits to attempt ridiculous bombing plots that they otherwise would’ve never conceived of. They rely on sketchy criminal informants, like Josef von Habsburg, a con man who worked with Agent Grimm, ginning up federal crimes for cash, like so many other FBI informants.
Grimm is just what happens when the worst sort of hyper-aggressive lawman transitions into another field where being a short-tempered bullying prick is rewarded rather than punished: conservative politics. The sort of person who very much wants to be a cop or an FBI undercover agent is the sort of person we should least trust with the job. While it’s tempting to say we also shouldn’t trust those sorts of men in politics, we’re probably safer with Grimm in Congress than with a badge and a license to use deadly force. Now, after all, he actually gets in trouble for his gangster movie tough guy act.
And because he represents Staten Island, New York City’s incongruous outpost of white reactionary resentment, we should probably not get our hopes up about getting rid of him any time soon.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, January 30, 2014
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