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NYPD bypassed facial recognition ban to ID pro-Palestinian student protester

(www.thecity.nyc)
291 points dataflow | 1 comments | 18 Jul 25 13:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.219s | source
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gruez ◴[18 Jul 25 14:11 UTC] No.44604843[source]▶
>A city fire marshal used FDNY’s access to a facial recognition software to help NYPD detectives identify a pro-Palestinian protester at Columbia University, circumventing policies that tightly restrict the Police Department’s use of the technology.

Why does the fire department need access to run facial recognition?

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neilv ◴[18 Jul 25 15:31 UTC] No.44605831[source]▶
> Why does the fire department need access to run facial recognition?

Arson investigation, identifying the people at the scene of a suspicious fire?

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krapp ◴[18 Jul 25 15:35 UTC] No.44605889[source]▶
The job of the fire department should be to fight fires, not to investigate crimes.

The police should be the ones investigating crimes, under extremely strict and limited guidelines (eg. 4th amendment) which in this case include not being allowed to use facial recognition software.

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1. some_random ◴[18 Jul 25 16:18 UTC] No.44606484[source]▶
I think it's better to have a specific expert non-police organization in charge of investigating specific crimes like this, in fact we could probably do more of this. The issue here is that the NYPD wasn't banned because of 4th amendment reasons but based on a local law that didn't consider this loophole.