"Baltimore cops swarmed and handcuffed a high school student after an artificial intelligence tool mistook his bag of Doritos for a weapon.Taki Allen, 16, was hanging out with his friends after football practice at Kenwood High School Monday night when all of a sudden, armed officers approached him."It was like eight cop cars that came pulling up for us. At first, I didn't know where they were going until they started walking toward me with guns, talking about, 'Get on the ground,' and I was like, 'What?'" Allen told local outlet WBAL-TV.The student described the moment he was handcuffed by police: "They made me get on my knees, put my hands behind my back, and cuffed me. Then, they searched me and they figured out I had nothing.”Allen said police then found the bag of Doritos he had been eating shortly before."
The story continues at The Independent. How difficult is it to be a high school student nowadays? This is a generation that has gone through mandatory shooter response drills since their childhood. Now AI is deciding whether they are suspected of being a criminal, and the responders come with guns drawn. FWIW any childhood stress in my era from nuclear war drills pales in comparison.
One thing that strikes me about American LEOs is how quickly they move to force and violence. In general, they can't wait to escalate situations and use absurd amounts of force. Who needs 8 cars full of police officers to arrest a 16-year old?
ReplyDeleteIn my neighborhood, police officers used to try and ticket a lot of people for the heinous crime of not fully stopping for a STOP sign. But while they were totally able to stop people on their own, they generally preferred to call backup of 3 or 4 buddies who would show up with screaming sirens to back them up handing out a ticket. They openly admitted they did that to intimidate the people who got a ticket. IMHO, you're no t much of a cop if you can't handle a very basic traffic violation without creating a traffic mess on a suburban street because 4 cop cars are parked all across the road with flashing lights.
What's so weird is that all these guys want to pretend they're tough, but they're just not. They can't just have a normal conversation and deal with any situation without relying on shouting, shoving, and tackling an unsuspecting person with several of them. This is not normal behavior. They're really nothing much more than IRL Cartmans shouting RESPECT MY AUTHORITY.
Also stop using systems that can't differentiate a back of chips from a gun. Seriously. Just stop. And admit you wasted tax money.
Oh and this reminds me that Minnesota hero Prince wrote a song about policing in Baltimore:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMLI7LFf84w
My hope is that every high school student starts carrying a crumpled chip bag.
ReplyDeleteFWIW ?
ReplyDeleteFreaky whales incur wrath ?
So many acronyms ... oops, SMA's !
Do you think I am 13 years old ? or is it 6/7 ... lols added.
I glaze over WBAL-TV because TV is known to me, from before I was 13 even, and the prefix just becomes irrelevant, it is just a TV station.
But then you get Nepkarel commenting above, and he or she writes LEO, so we are talking about people born in August, pretty much , maybe very late July ?
Yeah, yeah, here I am, brain the size of a planet and they've got me parking cars, but I figured it means Law Enforcement Officer.
But then ol' Neppy writes STOP, and I run through 287 possible solutions for that acronym until I just stop, without any capital.
IRL ? Irish Rugby League ?
By the by, I never have problems with LEOs because I treat them with respect, just like I do with everybody else, just like I do when I write words from the vast but not unlimited lexicon in my head, why call him Bill if his name is William, show some respect ! No need to save ink and effort on the WWW (world wide webbing).
I imagine that calling 3 or 4 other policing units for a minor traffic offence is probably because of Nepkarel's actions.
Maybe he/she called the police officer a LEO ?
An LEO ?
In a hysterical reaction to the statistical micro-threat of an active shooter, school personnel are doing more harm than the shooters themselves; that is, unless we ignore psychological harm to millions. Instead of focusing on the police response, which appears reasonable given the details of the case (what they knew and when they knew it), we might ask who decided it was a good idea to install an AI surveillance system in the first place? No doubt at great expense, both in monetary and social cost. Of course there will be "false positives" and police will respond accordingly. But what are children learning from living in a surveillance state, every school day of the year? That is, what's the lesson here? Who is really benefiting from terrorizing kids with shooter drills? I don't think it's the kids. I hate to think it's drama junkie adults in our school systems. I hate to think there's no critical mass of rational teachers and administrators who've read Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
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