Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain dead

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DDL
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by DDL »

You do your bitstring comparison and get four hundred people.

Now what?

Also, bear in mind that 'doing a DNA analysis', i.e. in more depth than a basic fingerprint...still is not a priori, unambiguous proof you've got your man. Coincidences can and do happen.

The lawyers'd have a field day with this.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by AEmer »

That couldn't technically happen. Upon entering hashes into your database, you'd do a comparison of the final hash. If, for any reason, you ever hash a marker report and you get an identical hash, you don't have enough identifying markers.

As you're designing the system, you figure out what markers you need.

Your goal would be something like, there would only be a clash for one in 10k individuals. That means, in a populations of 200 million, that 20k individuals wouldn't be listed. Typically, out of those, there would only be around 200 criminals that this system wouldn't be able to catch.

And these people wouldn't know that they were some of the few lucky ones. And yes, coincidences happen. They do today too. That's why you don't have overly harsh punishments, particularly when the evidence is weak.

Beyond _reasonable_ doubt and all that; we pick a number of wrongful convictions we're willing to live with, and then we make sure that the system is more precise than that, when you take into account that a good chunk of innocents would have alibi's or similar.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by ZeroPresence »

it warms my heart to know that you two actually seem to respect law enforcement.

A rare commodity that I cherish wherever I find it. Even just on an internet forum like this...

<3
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by AEmer »

Of course. Law enforcement is relatively important.

It's just...people use it wrong. Particularly during riots.

There are people who insist that lawbreakers shouldn't be suffered in open daylight; that kind of thing is just really draconian. It stems from a sense of justice, what is just, and what makes a society ordered, but it just nauseates me when I see videoes of what 0-tolerance of open daylight lawbreaking means in practice.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by DDL »

What I'm trying to convey is that DNA comparisons are not 100%, and indeed can never be 100%.

You're looking at the stats incorrectly, it's not a case that a 'clash of 1 in 10,000' would result in 200,000 individuals of a 200m pop 'not being listed', it means that for every blood sample you find (using your dart guns or whatever), your database would return 200,000 people that blood could come from. Not the same 200,000 every time, it's just that the hit rate for "test DNA" vs "huge database DNA" will always return false positives. And given that you're looking for ONE individual, every false positive reduces the efficiency massively. Plus there's also a chance of false negatives, so for your 200,000 possible candidates, your actual target might not even be one of them!

So you don't have a small population of 'immune' people, you have an entire population of people who will bring up cross matches with each other.

Obviously you could do SOME pruning (40% of our hits are female, we're looking for a male, 30% of our hits are elderly, we're looking for a young male, etc etc), but it's still going to be a large list of candidates.

And for every additional marker you add (bearing in mind you can't get the comparison fidelity to 100%, even if you used 'sequence entire genome' as a method, because replicase enzymes are just not that accurate), you drive up the cost of the system, since you need to add that marker to the tests for EVERYONE.

DNA testing is basically used to say "ok, we have a blood sample from the crime scene, and it matches the suspect's blood with a high degree of accuracy."

It also potentially matches a large number of OTHER people, but the chances of one of those other people being at the crime scene at the same time as the defendant are...very slim.

It's very good corroborating evidence: if you already have a suspect, it will be very helpful in ascertaining whether or not you have your man. If it's a match, then he's much more likely to be the guy you're looking for. If it's not a match, then he's much less likely to be the guy you're looking for. If you have five suspects, it'll help narrow that down to one or two.

What it WON'T do is pick a single guy out of a lineup of 200 million people.



So there's that.

Also, a lot of your objections seem to stem more or less exclusively around the behaviour of police during riots...which seems an oddly focussed approach, in that...well, riots are not that common. Clamouring for a full-spectrum policy change in the entire system of policing because you object to police behaviour under very specific circumstances seems..excessive? Surely it would be better to just look at how riots can be more safely handled?
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by AEmer »

Well, I guess my understanding of DNA evidence is lacking. I mean, I know this is your subject of expertise.

What I was given to understand was, you could nab a lot of identifying information from peoples dna. Simple example is bloodtype; that neatly slices the population into 4 subgroups (a, ab, b, 0). If you had 20 markers of similar strength and with a decent distribution amongst the population, that's 3.4 billion combinations of the 3 large subgroups. If you had 40, I figured you'd be able to uniquely identify people, if you had large enough samples.

That's clearly not the case; in that case, yeah, that system doesn't work.

And to be clear, my reason for the proposal is, I want smarter tools to avoid police violence, because I find it abhorant. And yeah, I do find riots is the biggest issue, but what I figure is, if you can solve a riot or an illegal protest without violence, you have a tool that can be used to solve most crimes-in-progress without violence too. That this approach will be safer for everyone involved.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by DaveW »

Personally I thought the police beating up rioters in London last year was hilarious.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by DDL »

@AEmer: Yeah...but the PCR won't always give an unambiguous answer, so a few of those categories will be N/A (and this applies to both database and test samples), and a few of them will be hilariously ethnic, so for a given pattern of markers you could say..demonstrate that "eleven of your twenty markers are found in 97% of people with chinese ethnicity", which means for chinese subjects you're sorting that subgroup only on the basis of the remaining 9 markers, so your fidelity drops. And so on.

Plus every additional test boosts the expense (in time, manpower, materials and storage), and again, you're never going to be able to say with TOTAL confidence that you have your man.

A better system would be a fuckton of CCTV cameras everywhere. Or even better, a fuckton of CCTV cameras AND the DNA system. But then you're looking at A) a vast expense, and B) pretty much the epitome of a police state.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by AEmer »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HECMVdl-9SQ

Yes dave, manslaughter is hillarious.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by AEmer »

DDL wrote:@AEmer: Yeah...but the PCR won't always give an unambiguous answer, so a few of those categories will be N/A (and this applies to both database and test samples), and a few of them will be hilariously ethnic, so for a given pattern of markers you could say..demonstrate that "eleven of your twenty markers are found in 97% of people with chinese ethnicity", which means for chinese subjects you're sorting that subgroup only on the basis of the remaining 9 markers, so your fidelity drops. And so on.

Plus every additional test boosts the expense (in time, manpower, materials and storage), and again, you're never going to be able to say with TOTAL confidence that you have your man.

A better system would be a fuckton of CCTV cameras everywhere. Or even better, a fuckton of CCTV cameras AND the DNA system. But then you're looking at A) a vast expense, and B) pretty much the epitome of a police state.
Yeah, but you're not ever using the system as evidence; you're using it to identify suspects.
Then you do a traditional DNA test if they don't admit culpability.

The point is, you pick enough markers - 20, 40, 60 however many - that you get a very high resolution. You go for enough markers that 99.99 percent of the population would be uniquely identified.

As for CCTV cameras, you could do something similar; you could do unmonitored CCTV camera's, ones with strictly local, 24 hour looping recording in public areas.

If you don't use them to alert you to crime, only to identify suspects _of_ crime, or evidence of crime after it has been reported, the privacy concerns are much, much less.

I know that a lot of people go on and on about police states and so on, but all you need to do is to insure that the tools of investigation aren't invasive and aren't used as a dragnet.

It's probably a moot point anyway - already, people are whipping out cell phone cameras everywhere something's going on, for their own protection. Within 20 years, people will be making personal recordings, for their own protection, of everything they do, and instead of being caught on CCTV that public entities own, you'll be caught on CCTV that private entities own.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by Jonas »

DaveW wrote:Personally I thought the police beating up rioters in London last year was hilarious.
I should save this comment in case you ever get caught in a riot and are mistaken for a rioter and beaten up by the police.

I'm sure it'll be hilarious.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by DaveW »

AEmer wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HECMVdl-9SQ

Yes dave, manslaughter is hillarious.
That was at the G20 protest, which is very different to the London riots. I don't approve of current UK police tactics in protests.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by Jonas »

The line pretty much always gets blurred though, when disenfranchised assholes show up to throw stones and smash storefronts during peaceful protests, and the police immediately escalates and tear-gasses the fuck out of everybody, arrests 900 random people, and ships them off to some improvised detainment centre in an unused warehouse with no heating or isolation to sit in cages on a concrete floor for 6 hours in the middle of winter.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by AEmer »

Add to that, unless someone declared martial law, people who are out in the streets during a riot _also_ have a right to not be manslaughtered to death.

But yeah, what Jonas said obviously goes: At some point, that thing switched from being a protest to being a riot, and you can't exactly get home easily from a riot, nor do you know how it's classified as you participate.

In particular, an illegal protest is _not_ a riot, and it is often handled as though it is.

Anyway, perhaps you can find a youtube video from one of those riots where the police beat up rioters, and maybe you can help us see the humor in them.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by DaveW »

I'm not talking about protesting at all, you brought protesting up. Don't act as if I did.

And here you go.
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