How the N.y.p.d.'s Facial Recognition Tool Landed the Wrong Man in Jail

Before I looked at the article I said to myself "He'll be black". Nuff said

> a spokesman said that the department never relied on it alone to make an arrest, and that the victim’s identification of Mr. Williams provided the evidence to charge him.

As a layman, it looks to me like the legal system is unprepared for the unintuitive issue that if you run a facial recognition search with a 0.000001 false positive rate on a database 10 million people, you get someone who:

1. Likely looks extremely close to the target

2. Has a 99% chance of not actually being the target

Eyewitness confirmation does little to shift that 99% because it'll be based largely on the same factors, rather than being independent evidence.

“Computer said you did it.” situations seem ripe for abuse and failure.

Even scarier with the black box that is AI…

How can I refute what a computer says if nobody knows how it came to a conclusion?