The law enforcement breed can be a pretty dark lot.  To be paid to think suspiciously leaves its mark, fostering an incentive to identify crimes and misdemeanours with instinctive compulsion.  Historically, this saw the emergence of quackery and bogus attempts to identify criminal tendencies.  Craniometry and skull size was, for a time, an attractive pursuit for the aspiring crime hunter and lunatic sleuth.  The crime fit the skull.  

With the onset of facial recognition technologies, we are seeing the same old habits appear, with their human creators struggling to identify the best means of eliminating compromising biases.  A paper published by IBM researchers in April 2019 titled “Diversity in Faces” shows that doing so ends up returning to old grounds of quackery, including the use of “craniofacial distances, areas and ratios, facial symmetry and contrast, skin color, age and gender predictions, subjective annotations, and pose and resolution.”

The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in identifying a form of predictive criminality perpetuates similar sins.  Police, to that end, have consistently shown themselves unable to resist the attractions supposedly offered by data programs and algorithmic orderings, however sophisticated.  These can take such crude forms as those advanced by Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco, a devotee of that oxymoronic pursuit “intelligence-led policing,” stacked with its snake oil properties.  A 2020 Tampa Bay Times piece on the exploits of that Florida........

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