
Huntington Park’s “RoboCop” stores pedestrians’ faces, scans license plates - danso
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2019/aug/05/california-hp-robocop/
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throwaway07Ju19
> _There’s nothing in the documentation to indicate what criteria the the HPPD
> would use, or is currently using, to add a face, license plate, or
> smartphones to a “blacklist,”_

Regulation can't come soon enough for this industry.

About 20 years ago one of the youngest cops ever to be promoted to detective
in the City of Chicago told me this after a long night of drinking...

"If I see a car with more than two black people, I just followed it. Sooner or
later they'll make a mistake and I can pull them over. Very often one of them
will have an outstanding warrant.". When my face turned to horror he asked me
the jaw-dropping question "you are Italian, right ?"

Honestly, if ML is statistically driven, how long before it determines that
African Americans and Latinos are over represented in the criminal database
and should have a higher blacklist score as a rule and the whole cycle
repeats. Meanwhile innocent looking white kids can keep selling meth in the
park.

~~~
bko
From your story it seems like human guards are profiling African Americans and
Latinos now. At least with a bot you'd be able to explicitly prevent them from
doing so. Probably a lot harder to prevent a human from using biases

~~~
closeparen
Machine learning - using statistical associations between features in a large
population to make predictions about individuals - _is_ profiling. There is no
such thing as removing profiling from machine learning. The profiling is the
only thing there.

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excalibur
This is the same model as the "suicidal" robot from DC a couple of years back.

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/suicidal-r...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/suicidal-
robot-did-not-kill-itself-fountain-accident-loose-brick-surface-a7866856.html)

~~~
snsr
Knightscope robots also assault children apparently without repercussions.
[https://abc7news.com/news/parents-upset-after-stanford-
mall-...](https://abc7news.com/news/parents-upset-after-stanford-mall-robot-
injures-child/1423093/)

I wonder whether a cardboard box is a good first line of defense against
these?

~~~
yoz-y
I wonder what the problem was. The article states that the robot first ran
over the child. Are the sensors scanning only too high? How does it avoid low
obstacles then?

At the peril of sounding heartless I’d say that it is quite probable that the
kid ran into the robot because they were not watching where they were going,
it has happened to me several times that a kid ran into me from the back.

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asteli
I'm waiting for someone stick a speaker to one that just repeats "EXTERMINATE!
EXTERMINAAAATE!" line as this robot bumbles around whatever corporate campus
it's deployed on.

~~~
elwell
Hopefully they remember to leave their phone at home or blocking their face
won't be sufficient to protect their identity.

~~~
asteli
It might get you banned from that particular retirement community but it's
hard to imagine being prosecuted for hilariously taping a speaker to what's
basically a really buff roomba

~~~
bastawhiz
I'm not even sure what they would charge you with. Disturbing the peace?

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Animats
There's one of those Knighscope K5 units at The Beacon, in San Francisco,
between 4th, 5th, King, and Townsend. It's very slow moving in its normal
mode. You can walk up to it. It's probably there to keep homeless people from
camping in their plaza.

Or maybe to discourage the undesirable element of drunk white guys from the
ballpark.[1]

[1] [https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Knuckleheads-run-
amok-a...](https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Knuckleheads-run-amok-after-
Giants-win-3990567.php)

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whalesalad
Most cop cars these days have scanners on the rear trunk that will scan
license plates as it drives by.

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/72131699@N00/3803321792](https://www.flickr.com/photos/72131699@N00/3803321792)

Note this photo was taken in 2009. This is not a new concept.

~~~
WWLink
Some towns in LA mounted those on their traffic lights around the edge of
town. Yep.

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asdff
8k/month to do a $20/hr at most job. Just hire another meter maid, they can
actually restrain someone or conduct first aid.

Classic small town logic, all about the shiny new toys.

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harimau777
How do you blacklist someone from a city?

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VectorLock
I know there is probably a good reason they made it look like a Cylon, some
down-forward facing sensor, but its still really funny to me.

~~~
cortesoft
I was thinking it looks more like a Dalek...

~~~
VectorLock
Its like if a Cylon and a Dalek had a baby.

Adorable.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
With the colouration of Marvin the Paranoid Android.

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devoply
Harder and hard to write any sort of fiction where the protagonist does
anything slightly illegal, not to mention extremely illegal, and is not
immediately apprehended.

~~~
mkl
Very few people violating the law are immediately apprehended for it. It would
be very hard to write realistic contemporary fiction where that happened
consistently.

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caymanjim
I don't see this thing surviving for too long. Someone's going to vandalize it
or steal it, even with its array of sensors.

~~~
onetimemanytime
so they'll make them harder to destroy...or put them 30 feet up in the air.
Sadly, we're screwed. This is staying

~~~
rhacker
I give it 3 months before someone with a mask on shows up and shoots it 8
times in the "head". Same result with a drone. That's why the ones in the
movie robocop worked, because it had guns, and a mind of its own (usually a
brain from a convict too). This is more like a roomba with a camera.

I don't think anyone will steal it for fear of GPS tracking.

~~~
elwell
And then get sued based on their phone id being sent back to homebase:
[https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6239554-13-Staff-
Rep...](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6239554-13-Staff-Report-K5-HP-
RoboCop-11-6-18.html#document/p2/a516150)

~~~
caymanjim
I don't expect it will be destroyed by a cunning criminal with an agenda. It's
just going to get beaten up by some kids goofing around, or some drunk dude
walking home from the pub, or someone who just wants to smash things. They'll
quite possibly get caught.

~~~
mc32
Pretty much. It’d be like walking into police station and attempting a crime.
By the time they do something everything about them is known. It’s self
defeating.

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rhacker
The referenced twitter link shows a news broadcast of them describing it. He
starts to laugh near the end of what he was saying - almost like he was going
to say, this can't end well. And then she blurts out - I Kinda Like It -
cutting him off.

haha

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newshorts
I don’t know why (maybe it’s the shape or something...) but this thing elicits
a strong desire within me to run it over with my pickup. Then incinerate the
remaining pieces with a boring company flame thrower.

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oooshha
I will pop on a Hong Kong style facemask and push this thing down a staircase.

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vondur
It’ll probably get stolen or vandalized in that area. Source, I live nearby.

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reaperducer
No need to even vandalize the thing. Just shove it over.

~~~
ryanisnan
It weighs around 400lbs. Pushing it over is not something most would be
capable of. Were they successful, It has omni-directional vision, and
undoubtedly that information is sent to the cloud almost immediately, so this
seems like a bad strategy.

~~~
brk
Well, the company is nearly bankrupt and has lost a lot of people lately so
odds are you might get away with it.

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rb808
Is this like the one that drowned a few years back?
[https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/7/17/15986042/dc-
security...](https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/7/17/15986042/dc-security-
robot-k5-falls-into-water)

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decebalus1
Soon enough, It will also store pedestrians' feces.

~~~
whalesalad
In San Francisco a shit sucking robot would be transformative.

