Ride the Lightning

Fresno Police Use Tech to Calculate Your Threat “Score”

January 13, 2016

Yesterday, I wrote about robotic warfare. My topic today is no cheerier. According to a Washington Post story, police in Fresno CA are turning into a collective Big Brother. The reporter visited the city's Real Time Crime Center, where operators watch 57 monitors displaying video from 200 locations. That number will increase as video is added from cameras worn by officers.

They scan a database of vehicle license plates and locations, search social media to monitor individuals who pose threats and use microphones placed throughout the city to gauge the location of gunshots (which made me wonder what else those microphones could pick up).

Most controversial of all, they use threat-scoring software called Beware – they are among the first in the country to do so.

Beware automatically runs the address of locations where police are called. The software determines who lives there and scans their names to produce a threat level of each one. Its maker, Intrado, says in promotional materials that it could detect that a resident at a particular address is a war veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, has criminal convictions for assault, and has posted troubling messages on social media.

One city council member asked police for his own threat level. As an individual, the council member wasn't seen as a threat, but his home was a "yellow" intermediate level, possibly because of someone who previously lived there. Now that's pretty scary – so he gets treated like a threat because of a previous resident?

The police are, to their credit, studying the privacy implications of their surveillance and trying to come up with a balance. But boy oh boy, this is very high tech surveillance – and a lot of data is being gathered that I'm betting citizens of Fresno are completely unaware of.

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