Coming to terms with biometrics in policing (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 3:Science and Tech 
Prelims level:  Biometrics 
Mains level:Uses of biometrics and its challenges to threat 

Context:

• There is global consensus that the police charter need to focus equally on crime prevention and detection. 
• The use of facial identification software will help the police on this focus but it is facing many challenges.

About dismaying paradox:

• Citizens want newer crime control measures to keep them safe. 
• At the same time, they resent smarter police innovations in the field because of perceived danger to individual rights and privacy. 
• Surprisingly, the campaign against police experiments has a stand that the end should not justify the means used by state agencies. 
• Although only by a few groups, this explains the sharp adverse responses to a counter-crime facial recognition technology. 
• This technology seeks to make inroads into the underworld’s ability to escape the police detection. 

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Why the police use this technology?

• Despite robust and aggressive policing, most of the police forces including the Indian police have been guilty of underperformance.
• The criminals merge with the community to escape identification.
• So, the police in many countries have sought the help of expert security agencies to scan faces seen in public spaces. 
• This is with a view to run them against available databases of faces used in crime fighting.
• The resistance especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, against facial recognition software, has been baffling. 
• Its modest use in India explains the lack of public discourse on the pros and cons of facial identification software.

Criticisms: 

• There are people who believe that this facial recognition technology discriminates against minorities and ethnic groups. 
• This is an incomprehensible charge because the cameras take pictures at random rather than of specific segments of the population. 
• The next opposition was from activists who focus on privacy violation. 
• Criticism is mainly on the ground that recognition technology has many a time been found guilty of errors. 
• These critics should remember is that our faces are already online in a number of places, for example, through increased use of CCTV cameras. 
• When this is the reality, objecting to the police scanning people for the objective of solving a case under investigation is unreasonable.

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Key points favouring the use of this technology:

• When there is no match of a face with existing records with the police, these data would be deleted. 
• If the matched data is not required for further investigation, they would be deleted within a particular time frame. 
• There are many instances in which cases were solved with the help of facial recognition. 

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Highlights the reveal of U.S. study in 2019:

• Many of the facial recognition algorithms today are likely to misidentify members of some groups more frequently than they do of the others. 
• The findings of this study raise doubts about the wisdom of employing facial recognition software indiscriminately. 
• The study said that the error rates could perhaps be brought down by using a diverse set of training data. 
• It is unclear whether the misidentification is due to bias built into the software. But the danger of misidentification cannot be brushed aside.

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Conclusion:

• Ultimately, any modern technology is filled with hidden dangers. 
• There is no claim of infallibility either by the software maker or by the person selling it or who advocates its deployment. 
• Grave errors from its use are however few and far between. 
• The facial recognition plays a vital role in criminal justice administration, just as the DNA testing establishes either the guilt or the innocence of a person arraigned for crime.
• Over the years, there is a marked improvement in the way policemen handle digital evidence. 
• The similar care and sophistication will soon mark criminal investigation by police forces across the globe.

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General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

Prelims Questions:

Q.1)With reference to the Crime Multi Agency Centre (Cri-MAC), consider the following statements:

1. A Crime Multi Agency Centre (Cri-MAC) aims to share information between various police forces on heinous crimes.
2. It is meant to share information on heinous crimes and other issues related to inter-state coordination.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
(a) 1 only
(b) 2 only
(c) Both 1 and 2
(d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer.....................................

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Mains Questions:
Q.1)What is a dismaying paradox? Why the police use this technology? What are the criticisms of it?