Detroit Skating Rink Horns In On Detroit PD's Facial Recognition Gaffe Racket, Denies Teen Girl Opportunity To Skate

from the even-if-our-software-is-wrong,-we-will-still-enforce-its-decision dept

It looks like Detroit, Michigan is trying to corner the market on bad facial recognition tech. The city's police department is already associated with two false arrests based on bad matches by facial recognition software. This latest news, via Techdirt reader Jeffrey Nonken, shows mismatches aren't just limited to the public sector.

A Black teenager in the US was barred from entering a roller rink after a facial-recognition system wrongly identified her as a person who had been previously banned for starting a fight there.

Lamya Robinson, 14, had been dropped off by her parents at Riverside Arena, an indoor rollerskating space in Livonia, Michigan, at the weekend to spend time with her pals. Facial-recognition cameras installed inside the premises matched her face to a photo of somebody else apparently barred following a skirmish with other skaters.

The teen told staff it couldn't possibly be her since she had never visited the venue before. But it didn't matter to the management of the rink, which is located in a Detroit suburb. She was asked to leave and now her parents are considering suing the rink over the false positive. Fortunately, no one at the rink felt compelled to call the police, which likely wouldn't have helped anything considering local law enforcement's track record with faulty facial recognition search results.

As for Riverside Arena, it's apologetic but not exactly helpful. Management claims deploying facial recognition tech on patrons is part of the "usual" entry process. It also unexplained that it's "hard to look into things when the system is running," which I suppose means that's why no one could double-check the match while Robinson was still there contesting the search results.

Being wrong some of the time is also good enough for non-government work, apparently.

"The software had her daughter at a 97 percent match. This is what we looked at, not the thumbnail photos Ms. Robinson took a picture of, if there was a mistake, we apologize for that."

Obviously, there was a mistake. So, this should have just been an apology, not a half-hearted offer of an apology if, at some point in the future, someone other than the people directly affected by this automated decision steps forward to declare the mismatch a mismatch.

This is the other side of the facial recognition coin: private sector use. This is bound to result in just as many mismatches as government use does, only with software that's perhaps undergone even less vetting and without any direct oversight outside of company management. False positives will continue to be a problem. How expensive a problem remains to be seen, but since private companies are free to choose who gets to use their services, lawsuits probably won't be much of a deterrent to deploying and using unvetted software that will keep the wrong people out and, perhaps more disturbingly, let the wrong people in.

Filed Under: detroit, facial recognition, livonia, michigan, skating rink
Companies: riverside arena

Detroit The Latest City Forced To Cobble Together Working Internet Thanks To Telecom Market Failure

from the so-heartwarming! dept

Frustrated by slow speeds, high prices, and spotty broadband availability (read: market failure) more than 750 US towns and cities have explored some kind of home-grown broadband option. Sometimes that's a local cooperative. Sometimes it's an extension of the locally owned power utility. Sometimes it's a public/private partnership with an existing internet provider. And sometimes it involves building an entire local broadband network from scratch. But always it's motivated by one thing: an ever growing, multi-decade frustration at the lack of competition and options in the US broadband market.

Enter Detroit, which is the latest city where annoyed users are being forced to build an entirely new ISP block by block:

"Detroit has historically been one of the least connected cities in America, with about 40 percent of Detroit residents lacking any home internet access at all. Things are changing, though, thanks in large part to projects like the Equitable Internet Initiative (EII), a collaboration between the Detroit Community Technology Project and a network of community organizations."

The effort involves relying on voluntary bandwidth provided by local enterprise provider 123Net. From there, locals are getting speeds of 25 Mbps via point to point wireless. That's a notable improvement for the 40% of the city that has no access to broadband at all. Or other major chunks of the city, where aging AT&T DSL may be their only option. If you're really lucky, an expensive Comcast cable line is your only broadband option.

But there's something that grates on me about these stories and it's this: for whatever reason, most major press outlets covering broadband in 2021 act as if the "digital divide" is this thing that just dropped from the sky one day. But the reason it still exists in 2021 is due to the regional monopolization and the corruption (federal and local) that protects it. Consumer groups have repeatedly showcased how with no competition and feckless regulatory oversight, AT&T just often simply refuses to upgrade its aging network. They've also shown how this impacts marginalized and low-income communities the hardest:

But for whatever reason, The Hill writes an entire story about Detroit's broadband problems and... doesn't mention AT&T's regional monopolization or political and regulatory corruption at all. There's just no shortage of stories like this that cover America's broadband dysfunction and the ad hoc solutions people are forced to come up with to get online, yet just fail completely to explain why this is happening. And kind of like stories where a local kid has to crowdfund his open heart surgery because our medical system is broken, the press tends to frame these efforts as heartwarming.

But it's extremely rare you see major outlets clearly explain that US broadband dysfunction was an active policy choice. It's the direct result of 25 straight years of prioritizing the interests of regional monopolies, and coddling giants like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast. It's the direct result of signing off on mindless consolidation and harmful megamergers. It's the direct result of choosing not to embrace pro-competition policies. It's the direct result of repeatedly neutering telecom regulatory oversight under the (false) promise this somehow results in telecom Utopia (despite 25 years of evidence this isn't true).

At this point our broadband failures aren't a matter of technology, or cost. After all, we've thrown countless billions of dollars at these incumbent broadband giants for fiber networks that mysteriously always wind up half completed. They're the result of leadership failure and corruption. But instead of clearly acknowledging and fixing these problems, we seem obsessed with (as the Trump era made fairly clear) doubling down on the bad choices that created them. Then dismissing the high prices, spotty coverage, and substandard service as just something that appeared one day, utterly free of any meaningful causation.

Filed Under: community broadband, competition, detroit, fcc, municipal broadband

Detroit PD Detective Sued For His (Second) Bogus Arrest Predicated On Questionable Facial Recognition Searches

from the fool-yourself-once... dept

On January 9, 2020, facial recognition tech finally got around to doing exactly the thing critics had been warning was inevitable: it got the wrong person arrested.

Robert Williams was arrested by Detroit police officers in the driveway of his home. He was accused of shoplifting watches from a store on October 2, 2018. The store (Shinola) had given Detroit investigators a copy of its surveillance tape, which apparently was of little interest to the Detroit PD until it had some facial recognition software to run it through.

This was the dark, grainy image the Detroit PD felt was capable of returning a quality match:

That picture is included in Williams' lawsuit [PDF] against the Detroit Police Department. Even in the best case scenario, this picture should not have been uploaded to run a search against. It's low quality, poorly-lit, and barely shows any distinguishing facial features.

What makes it worse is that all facial recognition AI -- across the board -- performs more poorly when attempting to identify minorities. That's the conclusion reached by an NIST study of 189 different algorithms. It's not just some software. It's all of it.

The Detroit PD chose to run with that photo. Then it decided the search results it had were close enough to probable cause to effect an arrest, even though the software used stated clearly search results should not be used this way. The search was performed by the Michigan State Police from the grainy image submitted by the Detroit PD. A report was returned but investigators were cautioned against trying to turn this into probable cause:

The following statement appeared prominently on the Investigative Lead Report, in the form shown: “THIS DOCUMENT IS NOT A POSITIVE IDENTIFICATION. IT IS AN INVESTIGATIVE LEAD ONLY AND IS NOT PROBABLE CAUSE TO ARREST. FURTHER INVESTIGATION IS NEEDED TO DEVELOP PROBABLE CAUSE TO ARREST.” The phrase “INVESTIGATIVE LEAD ONLY” was highlighted in red ink.

The report was also light on any other details that might have indicated Robert Williams was actually the shoplifter in question.

The Investigative Lead Report contains neither the “score” generated by the facial recognition system representing the level of confidence that Mr. Williams’s photo matched the probe image, nor the other possible matches that, upon information and belief, should have been returned by the system.

The Detroit Police Department did not attempt to ascertain the “score” generated by the facial recognition search nor request the other possible matches to the probe photo.

Two months after the PD obtained these search results, the investigation was turned over to another detective, Donald Bussa. At the point he assumed control of the investigation, Bussa was supposed to be operating under the PD's new facial recognition policy that acknowledged the limitation of the tech and stated search results would need to be peer reviewed to ascertain their accuracy. This didn't happen.

Defendant Bussa, however, ignored the new policy. Even though the facial recognition search “identifying” Mr. Williams as the shoplifter was generated by a woefully substandard probe image and had never been peer reviewed by DPD officers, as required by the new policy, Defendant Bussa decided to rely on the lead anyway.

Bussa assembled a "six pack" of suspect photos that contained an image taken from Williams' expired drivers license. (Before this investigation took place, Williams had secured a new license and an updated photo.) He tried to speak to the staff at Shinola but management refused to cooperate, stating that it was not interested in having its employees appear in court. Unable to speak to the sole eyewitness who had actually conversed with the shoplifting suspect, Detective Bussa decided to bypass Shinola completely.

Defendant Bussa then arranged to conduct a six-pack photo identification with Katherine Johnston. Ms. Johnston, then employed by Mackinac Partners, was contracted by Shinola for loss prevention services.

Defendant Bussa had no legitimate basis whatsoever for asking Ms. Johnston to participate in an identification procedure. Ms. Johnston was not an eyewitness. Ms. Johnston was not in the Shinola store at the time of the incident and has never seen Mr. Williams or the alleged shoplifter in person. Indeed, Ms. Johnston’s sole relation to the incident was that she had watched the same low-quality surveillance video that Detective Bussa possessed.

Bussa sent Detective Steve Posey out with the loaded "six pack" to pretty much guarantee Williams was selected as the prime suspect.

The photo array was not a blind procedure—Posey knew that Mr. Williams was the suspect. Indeed, Posey’s sheet was nearly identical to that given to Ms. Johnston, except that Mr. Williams’s name was printed in red while all other names were printed in black.

Ms. Johnston identified Mr. Williams’s expired license photo as matching the person she had seen in the grainy surveillance footage, and answered the question “Where do you recognize him from?” with “10/2/18 shoplifting at Shinola’s Canfield store.”

With that, Bussa went out to get an arrest warrant and the rest is facial recognition history. He secured this warrant by omitting some key details, like the fact the suspect was picked out of a facial recognition database using a low quality image. It also did not note that the person who picked Williams out of Bussa's loaded lineup wasn't even at the store the day the shoplifting happened. And it didn't mention Bussa's bypassing of Detroit PD policies that were put in place to prevent exactly this sort of false identification.

The lawsuit also points out that the same software and the same two detectives were involved in another false arrest -- one that occurred five months before the PD arrested Williams. Detective Bussa and Detective Posey used unvetted search results to arrest Michael Oliver for an assault he didn't commit. Even if the facial recognition software had done its job accurately (which it didn't), the tech would not have noticed something far more obvious: the suspect's arms (as captured in the phone recording) were unmarked. Michael Oliver's arms are covered with numerous tattoos.

Williams alleges a long list of violations he's hoping to hold Detective Bussa (and his supervisor) accountable for. It's going to be pretty difficult for the detective to argue he operated in good faith in the Williams arrest. After all, he'd already followed the same broken process to falsely arrest someone else months earlier. Then he ignored the PD's policy on facial recognition tech. He also ignored the big, bold warning printed across the search results he obtained from the State Police. And none of this information -- which would have undercut his probable cause assertions -- made its way into his warrant request.

Any reasonable officer would know a lot of what Detective Bussa did was wrong. But Bussa would know this more than even the most reasonable of officers because it wasn't the first time he'd screwed up.

Filed Under: detroit, detroit pd, detroit police department, donald bussa, facial recognition, michael olivier, michigan state police, robert williams, steve posey

Detroit PD Now Linked To Two Bogus Arrests Stemming From Facial Recognition False Positives

from the no-problem,-it's-just-rights-and-freedom dept

Late last month, the first known false arrest linked to facial recognition software was reported. But that first in AI police work now appears to be merely a repeat offender. There have been two bogus arrests linked to facial recognition false positive. And both bogus arrests were performed by the same law enforcement agency, the Detroit Police Department. Elisha Anderson of the Detroit Free Press has the details on the first blown call by the PD's software.

The high-profile case of a Black man wrongly arrested earlier this year wasn't the first misidentification linked to controversial facial recognition technology used by Detroit Police, the Free Press has learned.

Last year, a 25-year-old Detroit man was wrongly accused of a felony for supposedly reaching into a teacher’s vehicle, grabbing a cellphone and throwing it, cracking the screen and breaking the case.

Detroit Police used facial recognition technology in that investigation, too.

This man, Michael Oliver, was charged with larceny for the May 2019 incident he didn't actually participate in. The report by the Free Press contains photos of both the person caught on the phone's camera and Michael Oliver. They highlight one major problem with facial recognition software: even if one could be persuaded the two faces are a close match (and they don't appear to be), the recording used by investigators to search for a match showed the suspect's bare arms. The person committing the crime had no tattoos. Michael Oliver's arms are covered with tattoos, running from the top of his hands all the way up to his shoulders.

The facial recognition software delivered its mistake to investigators, who included this mismatch in the photos they presented to the person whose phone had been grabbed.

During the investigation, police captured an image from the cellphone video, sent it for facial recognition and the photo came back to Oliver, the police report said.

After Oliver was singled out, a picture of his face was included in a photo lineup of possible suspects that was presented to the teacher.

A second person, a student, was also captured in the video with the suspect. The officer in charge of the case testified he didn’t interview that person though he'd been given that student’s name.

Once again, the Detroit PD and local prosecutors are promising the thing that has already happened twice won't happen again. There are new processes in place, although it's unclear when those policies went into effect. Oliver was arrested late last year. The other bogus arrest occurred earlier this year. In both cases, reporters were assured by law enforcement spokespeople that things have changed.

Here's what official say is now in place, even though it's too little too late for two Black men arrested and charged for crimes they didn't commit. There are "stricter rules" in effect. Matches returned by the system are not probable cause for anything, but can only be used as "investigative leads." Supposedly, this software will now only be used to identify people wanted for violent felonies.

Prosecutors are doing things a bit differently, too. But it's a reaction, rather than a proactive effort. t's only now -- after two false arrests -- that the prosecutor's office is mandating review of all facial recognition evidence by the city's top prosecutor, Kym Worthy. Investigators must also produce corroborating evidence before seeking to arrest or charge someone based on a facial recognition match.

This seems unlikely to change anything. Outside of the limitation to violent crimes, both of these cases could have gone through the review process -- along with the limited corroborating evidence (in both cases, crime victims picked the AI's mismatches out of a lineup) -- and still resulted in the arrest of these two men. In both cases, investigators ended their investigations after this step, even though they were given the opportunity to interview other witnesses. If corroboration is nothing more than discovering humans are just as bad at identifying people as the PD's software is, the mistakes the PD claims will never happen again will keep on happening.

Filed Under: detroit, detroit police department, facial recognition, false arrest, michael oliver

Detroit Police Chief Says Facial Recognition Software Involved In Bogus Arrest Is Wrong '96 Percent Of The Time'

from the good-to-have-that-all-out-in-the-open dept

The law enforcement agency involved with the first reported false arrest linked to facial recognition software is talking about its software. The Detroit Police Department -- acting on a facial recognition "match" handed to it by State Police investigators -- arrested resident Robert Williams for allegedly shoplifting watches from an upscale boutique.

Williams did not commit this robbery. He even had an alibi. But the investigators weren't interested in his answers or his questions. They had a lo-res screen grab from the store's CCTV camera -- one that software provided by DataWorks Plus said matched Williams' drivers license photo. Thirty hours later, Williams was cut loose by investigators, one of which said "I guess the computer screwed up" after rewatching the camera footage with Williams present.

The officers ignored the bold letters on top of the "match" delivered by the software. The writing said "This document is not a positive identification." It also said the non-match was not "probable cause for arrest." Unfortunately for the misidentified Michigan resident, the cops who arrested him treated the printout as both: positive identification and probable cause.

The policies governing law enforcement's use of this tech have changed since Williams' arrest in January. Under the current policy, lo-res images like the one that led to this arrest are no longer allowed to be submitted to the facial recognition system. That fixes a very small part of the problem. The larger problem is that the tech is mostly good at being bad. This isn't a complaint from critics. This comes directly from the top of the DPD.

In a public meeting Monday, Detroit Police Chief James Craig admitted that the technology, developed by a company called DataWorks Plus, almost never brings back a direct match and almost always misidentifies people.

“If we would use the software only [to identify subjects], we would not solve the case 95-97 percent of the time,” Craig said. “That’s if we relied totally on the software, which would be against our current policy … If we were just to use the technology by itself, to identify someone, I would say 96 percent of the time it would misidentify."

So, it's a bad idea to rely on the software and nothing else when attempting to identify criminal suspects. What happened to Robert Williams supposedly should never happen again… according to policy. But there's the question of why the PD still uses the software if it's not adding much value to the investigative process. It seems officers don't care much for the tech and yet it's still in use. The police chief thinks it's still worth keeping around, even if it has yet to show any positive results.

Craig and his colleague, Captain Ariq Tosqui, said that they want to continue using facial recognition because they say it can be a tool to assist investigators even if it doesn’t often lead to arrest. But even when someone isn’t falsely arrested, their misidentification through facial recognition can often lead to an investigator questioning them, which is an inconvenience at best and a potentially deadly situation at worst. According to Tosqui, the technology has been used on a total of 185 cases throughout the years. “The majority of the cases the detective reported back that [the software] was not useful.”

What it can do, apparently, is add another layer of surveillance on top of what's already in place. And it will do what most law enforcement surveillance creep does: put more eyes on Black residents. Part of the mild reforms Detroit enacted -- rather than implement a facial recognition ban -- mandate the publication [PDF] of facial recognition data by the department. Since the beginning of this year, the PD has used the tech 70 times. All but two of those instances involved a Black resident's photos being submitted.

One of the main sources for uploaded photos is the Project Green Light (PGL) network of cameras [PDF]. These are installed in or around businesses that participate in the project. Participation comes at a cost: $1-6,000 for the initial investment and $1,600 a year in video storage fees. The 550 participants' cameras are supposedly monitored 24/7 at the PD's "real time crime center." Incoming footage can be subjected to other surveillance tech, like facial recognition software and automatic license plate readers.

Here's the panopticon the city wanted:

The City of Detroit put forth a Request for Proposals for a contractor to work closely with the city, DPD, and Motorola (Company that help set up the RTCC) to set up a “turn-key” facial recognition system that would work with the already existing infrastructure of the RTCC. They specifically asked that the facial recognition work on at least 100 concurrent real-time video feeds, be integrated into the PGL system, and can be used by officers with a mobile app.

It got the software it needed from DataWorks: a blend of two algorithms known as "Face Plus." It's scary stuff.

Face Plus is capable of automatically searching all faces that enter camera frames against photos in the entity’s database, alerting authorities to any algorithmic matches. Additionally, there is a “watchlist” option where persons of interest can be monitored and alerted for…

According to DataWorks Plus, in 2017, this repository contained 8 million criminal pictures and 32 million “DMV” pictures. As the Free Press reported in March 2019, almost every Michigan resident has a photo of them in this system.

This is the system the police chief calls 96% inaccurate and DPD investigators call useless. Perhaps this false arrest, which has made national news, will put the brakes on the planned expansion of PGL and Face Plus to all public transit stops and vehicles. Or maybe it will convince the city it's paying too much for something that barely works and take facial recognition away from the PD until something better -- and less biased -- comes along.

Filed Under: detroit, detroit pd, facial recognition, police, robert williams
Companies: dataworks plus

Facial Recognition Software Finally Gets Around To Getting An Innocent Person Arrested

from the great-job-everyone dept

Well, it's happened. The thing people have been warning about for years. A person lost some of their freedom due to a facial recognition mismatch. It may have only been 30 hours, but it should have been zero. And it might have been zero hours if investigators had bothered to read the disclaimers attached to its facial recognition search results.

According to the New York Times report, this is the first time a false positive has led to someone being arrested. Or, at least, the first time the public's been made aware of it. A few years ago, the FBI and a local law enforcement agency used "facial analysis" performed by humans to arrest the wrong man twice for two separate robberies. This time, it was software. And it took 30 hours away from an innocent person.

On a Thursday afternoon in January, Robert Julian-Borchak Williams was in his office at an automotive supply company when he got a call from the Detroit Police Department telling him to come to the station to be arrested. He thought at first that it was a prank.

An hour later, when he pulled into his driveway in a quiet subdivision in Farmington Hills, Mich., a police car pulled up behind, blocking him in. Two officers got out and handcuffed Mr. Williams on his front lawn, in front of his wife and two young daughters, who were distraught. The police wouldn’t say why he was being arrested, only showing him a piece of paper with his photo and the words “felony warrant” and “larceny.”

His wife, Melissa, asked where he was being taken. “Google it,” she recalls an officer replying.

Googling it would not have helped. Williams was taken away by cops and held for 30 hours, accused of shoplifting watches from an upscale store nearly two years earlier. All the police had to work with were a blurry, lo-res screengrab from the store's CCTV camera and facial recognition software provided by DataWorks Plus. DataWorks tests AI algorithms created by contractors by running searches using low-quality images. DataWorks does not provide any measurements of these algorithms' accuracy, however. It apparently packages up its collection of algorithms and sells access to government agencies.

Five months after the crime was committed, Michigan State Police digital image examiner Jennifer Coulson uploaded the image captured by the store's camera. But investigators apparently ignored the big, bold warning attached to the top of the search results.

After Ms. Coulson, of the state police, ran her search of the probe image, the system would have provided a row of results generated by NEC and a row from Rank One, along with confidence scores. Mr. Williams’s driver’s license photo was among the matches. Ms. Coulson sent it to the Detroit police as an “Investigative Lead Report.”

“This document is not a positive identification,” the file says in bold capital letters at the top. “It is an investigative lead only and is not probable cause for arrest.”

The State Police still maintain investigators did nothing wrong. They didn't only rely on the facial recognition search results. They also showed Williams' drivers license photo to the loss prevention person at the store (as part of a "six-pack" of facial photos) and she supposedly identified him.

The contractors that supplied the AI system to the State Police seem skeptical of everything that happened here -- even their own software's participation in the arrest of Williams.

[Brendan] Klare, of Rank One, found fault with [the loss prevention person's] role in the process. “I am not sure if this qualifies them as an eyewitness, or gives their experience any more weight than other persons who may have viewed that same video after the fact,” he said. John Wise, a spokesman for NEC, said: “A match using facial recognition alone is not a means for positive identification.”

One of the officers who questioned Williams said -- after viewing the surveillance video again with Williams in the room -- that he "guessed the computer got it wrong." Even so, Williams was held for another several hours before being released on $1,000 bond. According to his first-person account of this incident, the first 18 hours of his detainment were spent in an overcrowded holding cell without any interaction with investigators or the officers who arrested him.

Two weeks later, prosecutors dropped the charges, but left themselves the option to refile the charges in the future. And the prosecutor's office appears to think that's a possibility. The spokesperson says there's another witness investigators are interviewing and cops might try to run Williams in again for a crime he didn't commit.

And Williams has an alibi. He posted a video to his Instagram account during his commute home from work. This occurred during the time the store was being robbed. But investigators never bothered to check. And this investigation -- which appears to have stemmed almost solely from a "match" generated by a lo-res CCTV screengrab -- resulted in an innocent man having his life severely disrupted.

Filed Under: arrests, detroit, facial recognition, robert williams, wrong guy

Ex-State Trooper Convicted Of Involuntary Manslaughter For Tasing A Teen Riding An ATV At 35 MPH

from the less-lethal? dept

Former Michigan State Trooper Mark Bessner is going to jail. Bessner originally faced a second-degree murder charge for tasing a teen riding an ATV, but was ultimately convicted of a lesser charge. The details here are provided by the New York Times, which seems to be trying to further exonerate the former law enforcement officer with its reporting.

A former Michigan state trooper was convicted of involuntary manslaughter on Wednesday, nearly two years after he fired a Taser at a teenager on an all-terrain vehicle who then crashed and died.

The teenager, Damon Grimes, 15, was illegally riding the A.T.V. in a residential area of Detroit in August 2017. State police officers followed in a patrol car to get him to pull over. When he did not immediately do so, the officer in the passenger seat of the patrol car pulled out his Taser and stunned Damon.

Video footage of the episode showed the A.T.V. veering toward the side of the road. The teenager crashed into the back of a parked truck and died shortly thereafter.

If this is the only writeup someone sees regarding this incident, they're going to come away with a lot of wrong impressions.

First, Bessner fired his Taser from his moving patrol car at Damon Grimes. Both vehicles were traveling at 35 mph when this happened. Earbuds were recovered from the scene, bringing into the question the assumed fact that Grimes knew he was being pursued by the troopers.

At the point the pursuit was initiated, Grimes had only committed a traffic infraction. Trooper Bessner decided to punish this with an inadvertent -- but foreseeable -- death sentence. The pursuit was unnecessary. Bessner's decision to tase a person riding an ATV at 35 mph by firing out the passenger window of his moving vehicle was beyond idiotic. It was psychopathic.

Bessner retired while under investigation. His former employer has attempted to exonerate itself by stating Bessner's Taser deployment fell outside of department guidelines. Inarguably, this is true. But what the agency won't own up to is its continued employment of a trooper who should have been fired long before he took someone's life. According to public records obtained by the Detroit Free Press, Bessner was a liability to the force for years.

Bessner has a history of using excessive force and has been reprimanded before for using his Taser inappropriately, including using the device on handcuffed suspects. The investigation into Bessner's conduct shows that over a four-year span ending in 2017, he had 40 use of force incidents, 17 pursuits and five car accidents.

The last stat possibly explains why Bessner was in the passenger seat. The rest of it explains why Bessner felt justified firing his taser at a teen riding an ATV -- a teen whose unprotected body was hurled headfirst into the rear end of a pickup truck, resulting in multiple deadly injuries, including a dislocated skull.

The Times article also skims right past Bessner's attempt to change his story during the trial. None of the records obtained by the Detroit Free Press contain anything indicating Bessner believed Grimes was carrying a gun. Multiple body camera and dashcam recordings contained zero statements about this CYA theory, as did the paperwork related to the incident and its subsequent investigation.

Nevertheless, Bessner tried to save himself by claiming -- months after being charged -- he thought the teen on the ATV was trying to pull out a gun.

“He had slowed down and he had looked back several times,” Bessner testified. “There was one very, very crystallizing moment where his left hand reached down towards his waist.”

He later said he “absolutely” believed Grimes had a gun and that his life was in jeopardy.

“It was a deadly force situation, is what I thought, and I used the tool I had available to me,” Bessner said.

After Grimes crashed the ATV, Bessner said he and his partner tried to help the teen. He also searched the victim for a gun.

“I was shocked that he didn’t have a weapon. I was shocked at the magnitude of what had happened,” Bessner testified.

Every cop who kills an unarmed person is "shocked" when they don't have a weapon. Some shock is legitimate. Some of it isn't really shock, but rather dismay that the "feared for my safety" defense may only be as bulletproof as the dead body at their feet.

State Trooper Bessner screwed up and it's going to cost him a few years of his freedom. But he didn't screw up by making a bad judgment call on force deployment. He screwed up by assuming he could act like a vigilante rather than a law enforcement officer and get away with it. His history with the state troopers shows it was a safe bet to make. But sometimes the bet doesn't pay off and the constant underdog -- police accountability -- scores a rare win.

Filed Under: atv, damon grimes, detroit, involuntary manslaughter, mark bessner, taser

Another Convicted Fraudster Attempts To Manage His Reputation With Bogus DMCA Takedown Notices

from the notreallyhowthatworks.gov dept

Say, folks: has this ever happened to you? You're performing vanity searches via your favorite search engine and wouldn't you know it, it keeps bringing up news reports and government press releases about your involvement in widespread city pension corruption?

It could happen to any of us. But what can you do about it? It seems like nothing can make the internet forget. What if I told you a simple online tool could fix this for you… GUARANTEED!*

^{*Not a guarantee. Offer not valid in the United States.}

DMCA notices, folks! It's what gets stuff done. Let's follow along with convicted investment advisor Chauncey Mayfield as he attempts to reclaim his search engine results from dozens of news websites, the FBI, the DOJ, and Wikipedia.

Copyright claim #1

KIND OF WORK:
Unspecified

DESCRIPTION:
I am a well respected person in the society that I come from, the US, and other parts of the world where I am known as an author or high net worth investor in private equity and real estate. However, recently, there are a number of websites that utilize my image to attract traction for people go through their content. My images and name can be seen at these websites. We want google to remove such sites from the search. Thanks.

Soooooo…

First off, "well-respected" may be a term of art I'm not familiar with, but being a participant in the rampant misuse of public funds would seem to undercut that claim, even when extended to "other parts of the world."

Second, the use of "your image" isn't infringement, even if these sites were using your image. But almost none of the 200+ URLs listed in Mayfield's bogus DMCA notices make use of any images of him. Certainly the FBI's doesn't. All it contains is Mayfield's guilty plea and more details about the bribery, extortion, and misuse of public funds by a number of Detroit public officials.

Whatever "attention" is being "tractioned" by stories about criminal activity by city employees doesn't rely on "images" Mayfield might possibly own. Chauncey Mayfield is a key player in the scenarios depicted by the articles he wants delisted. As the CEO of MayfieldGentry, he was apparently instrumental in securing the city's pension fund management contract through highly-questionable (and highly-illegal) means before sinking a few million into a failed shopping mall investment that led to the investigation of the city's fund management.

Unsurprisingly, Google has refused to delist any of the URLs submitted by the "highly respected" Chauncey Mayfield under the name of "Portfolio Property Management Global, LLC." I'm sure finding so many articles about your involvement in bribery, extortion, and mismanagement of a city's pension fund ruins vanity searches and makes people hesitant to do business with you, but that's nothing that can be solved by abusing the DMCA takedown system. If anything, it makes you look even more shady than the search results would suggest.

Filed Under: censorship, chauncey mayfield, detroit, dmca, doj, fbi, takedowns
Companies: google, mayfieldgentry

Cop Objects To Editorial About Community Policing, Sets Fire To 20-Year Career In Response

from the Facebroke dept

There's nothing quite like watching a professional with twenty years of experience burn it all to the ground in the space of a few hours. Officer Daniel Wolff of the Detroit PD -- spending some time at home recovering from a work-related injury -- took issue with Motor City Muckraker's story highlighting the number of police officers who don't live in the communities they serve.

He handled it badly. Here's Muckraker's Steve Neavling's coverage of the Facebook meltdown in which the journalist was personally attacked by the off-duty officer.

A Detroit cop on Tuesday called city residents “garbage” and bragged that he used to “hit them with “handcuffs in the head” and “smack” children in the face.

Officer Daniel Wolff was responding on Facebook to a Motor City Muckraker story about an increasing number of Detroit police choosing to live outside the city.

Wolff, who works in the second precinct and lives in the suburbs, said he would never live in the city he serves because it is “just a nasty place.”

“Getting rid of residency was the best thing that ever happened to the Detroit Police!!!!! We have to police the garbage but you can’t make us live in the garbage.”

Not only did Officer Wolff have a problem with being expected to "live in the garbage," but he felt the last few decades of technological advancement had made it much more difficult to police the streets the way Wolff would prefer to.

Wolff bemoaned cell phone cameras, saying, “You can’t walk up to a kid or asshole and smack him in the face like we did.”

And he had a few words for Neavling as well, when informed the Facebook conversation was being reported to his department. It involved Wolff's apparent desire to commit (career) suicide by cop, with the twist being that he was both ends of the equation.

When I told him that Internal Affairs was investigating, Wolff responded, “Please do. I’ve been trying to get fired for years you cunt. Help me you ass.”

Consider Wolff helped.

The department received Wolff's alleged comments from the Muckraker the day they were posted, according to Director Michael Woody of the public information office.

"We have forwarded them to our internal affairs for a full investigation," Woody said. "This is not representative of the vast majority of our officers in this department, who work hard every day to build relationships with members of our community."

Officer Wolff was apparently very thorough in his Facebook slating of the general public. According to Detroit Police Chief James Craig, there were several other allegedly "sexist" and "racist" comments delivered by the cop before he decided to memory hole his Facebook page.

[W]e’re going to move forward with the investigation and we should be at a finding fairly quickly," [Craig] said. "If this individual feels that strongly about working in the City of Detroit and has that type of attitude, we certainly don’t want him here."

Well, that would appear to align with Wolff's stated desire to be fired. With twenty years on the force, Wolff likely has a pension locked up and would probably be given the option to resign, which means taxpayers will continue paying a former public servant that has zero respect for them for the next several years.

As for the article that started it all, it simply makes the same point that could be made in nearly any major city: it's tougher to build relationships with the communities you serve while living as far away as you can from them. It's a problem everywhere and frankly, there's not much to be done about it. Coaxing, pleading, offering housing, etc. are about the limit of what city governments can do to help close this gap between the police and the policed. Anything else places tremendous restrictions on officers' freedoms. True, communities may be better served by officers with closer ties to the people they police, but mandating this would create larger rifts by adding a whole bunch of resentment and anger to the mix. In other words, the public would get Officer Wolff, who somehow maintains this level of anger and resentment despite living miles away from the neighborhood he works in.

Filed Under: community policing, daniel wolff, detroit, police, social media

Trademark Dispute Between Coffee Companies Over 'Detroit' Trademark Demonstrates The USPTO's Carelessness

from the motor-city-mayhem dept

It bears repeating: far too many of the trademark disputes we cover here at Techdirt are in large part the fault of a USPTO all too willing to grant trademarks on terms that are overtly either broad or based on geography. One would hope that it went without saying that trademarks, designed to inform the public as to the source of the products they buy, cannot work to that end if the identifying marks are not specific or original within the marketplace. Yet the Trademark Office too often doesn't seem to consider this when rubber-stamping applications.

For example, there is currently a trademark dispute going on between two coffee companies over the name of the city of "Detroit."

A local company’s Detroit-branded java doesn’t jive with an East Coast entity that claims it was the early bird in the Motor City joe business.

But the target of the complaint insists the Dec. 22 lawsuit filed by New York-based Detroit Coffee Co. is nothing more than a shakedown.

“This is a Wall Street-versus-Woodward type of mentality,” said A.J. O’Neil, owner of Hazel Park-based Detroit Bold Coffee Co. “They think the little guy will fold.”

Detroit Coffee Co., a Michigan LLC with a New York City address, filed a complaint alleging trademark infringement against Detroit Bold. It demands a jury trial in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

It's only through the absurdity of granting a trademark on something like "Detroit Coffee" to begin with that you can generate a reality that includes a New York City business suing a Detroit-based business over the name of a city combined with the name of a common product. When considering trademarks that incorporate geographic names, the bar for infringement is supposed to be much higher. And, should the case move forward, perhaps that higher standard will be applied, but it's still worth considering whether a trademark like "Detroit Coffee" ought ever to have been approved in the first place. After all, whatever the resolution in court ends up being, the monetary burden on such legal action isn't meager.

“It’s not like I have all this extra income to hire a big legal team and go (to New York) to fight this,” he said. “Those folks in New York are conjuring up something that at best has no merit.”

Adding to the strangeness of this particular case is that Detroit Coffee allowed its trademark to lapse until 2016, when it re-registered after Detroit Bold Coffee trademarked its two logos for "Detroit Bold Coffee Company."

O’Neil told The News he and his attorney, Mark Schneider, haven’t seen any evidence that Detroit Coffee actually sells any coffee under the Detroit Coffee name, or has ever sold coffee or other merchandise branded with that name. The trademarks the company pulled in the early 2000s were dead at the time Detroit Bold registered new logos bearing “Detroit Bold Coffee Co.” in early 2016, according to trademark office records.

Detroit Coffee renewed trademarks on the “Detroit Coffee” name for use on brewed coffees, teas and beverages on April 14, 2016, roughly two months after O’Neil registered two logos bearing the words “Detroit Bold Coffee Company.”

If true, that would seem to leave Detroit Bold Coffee in the clear, except it still would have to take on the burden of the court case. Which means this is all still ultimately the fault of a USPTO too willing to liberally approve trademarks.

Filed Under: coffee, detroit, trademark, uspto