On 16 February, Porcha Woodruff was helping her children get ready for school when six Detroit police officers arrived at her door. They told her she was under arrest for a January carjacking and robbery. She was so shocked she wondered for a moment if she was being pranked. She was eight months into a difficult pregnancy and partway through a nursing school programme. She did little else besides study and take care of her kids. She certainly wasn’t out stealing cars at gunpoint, she said. “I’m like, ‘What,?’ I opened my door so he could see my stomach. ‘I’m eight months pregnant. You can see two vehicles in the driveway. Why would I carjack?’” she told The Independent. “‘You’ve gotta be wrong. You can’t have the right person.’” Her children cried as she asked officers if the suspect was pregnant and insisted they had mistakenly arrested her. She was put in handcuffs and taken to jail, where she had panic attacks and early contractions. She later learned police identified her as a suspect after running security footage through the department’s facial recognition software, relying on a 2015 mugshot from a past traffic arrest into a photo lineup where the carjacking victim singled out Ms Woodruff as her assailant. The Detroit Police Department eventually dropped the case, but the arrest has deeply shaken Ms Woodruff. “What happened to the questioning? What happened to me speaking to someone?” she said. “What happened to any of the initial steps that I thought were available to a person who was accused of doing something?” The case underscores the growing risks of civil rights violations as police departments and law enforcement agencies across the country increasingly adopt facial-recognition and other mass surveillance technologies, often used as an unreliable shortcut around methodical human police work. Criminal justice advocates and the people targeted by this burgeoning police tech argue these programmes are riddled with the same biases and opaque or nonexistent oversight measures plaguing policing at large. The early results, at least, haven’t been encouraging. At least six people around the US have been falsely arrested using facial ID technology. All of them are Black. These misfires haven’t stopped the technology from proliferating across the country. At least half of federal law enforcement agencies with officers and a quarter of state and local agencies are using it. “We have no idea how often facial recognition is getting it wrong,” Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), told The Independent. “When you have facial recognition being used thousands of times, without any accountability for mistakes, it’s inviting injustice,” he added. Nowhere has that injustice been more pronounced than Detroit, a city where Black people have long experienced documented over-policing from law enforcement. Three of the six people mistakenly arrested by facial recognition technology have been in the Motor City, according to the ACLU. This status quo is why Ms Woodruff is suing DPD, claiming among other things that the agency has engaged in “a pattern of racial discrimination” against her and other Black residents “by using facial recognition technology practices proven to misidentify Black citizens at a higher rate than others in violation of the equal protection guaranteed by” the Michigan civil rights statutes. “I definitely believe that situation would’ve gone differently had it been another race, honestly, just my opinion. There was no remorse shown to me and I was pregnant. I pleaded,” she told The Independent. “Being mistaken for something as serious as that crime – carjacking and armed robbery – that could’ve put me in a whole different type of lifestyle,” she added. “I was in school for nursing. Felons cannot become nurses. I could’ve ended up in jail. That could have altered my life tremendously.” The Independent has requested comment from DPD. After Ms Woodruff filed her suit, Detroit police chief James White said in a press conference in August “poor investigative work” led to the false arrest, not facial recognition technology. He claimed that department software gave detectives numerous possible suspects and was only meant to be a “launch” point for further investigation. “What this is, is very, very poor investigative work that led to a number of inappropriate decisions being made along the lines of the investigation, and that’s something this team is committed to not only correcting, having accountability, having transparency with this community, and in building policy immediately to ensure regardless of the tool being used, this never happens,” Mr White said. He added that officers won’t be allowed to use images sourced by facial recognition in lineups, and warrants based on facial ID matches must be reviewed by two captains before being carried out. ‘The lead and the conclusion’ Some aren’t convinced these changes will prevent the excesses of what they see as a fundamentally flawed technology. “The technology is flawed. It’s inaccurate,” Philip Mayor, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Michigan, told The Independent. “Police repeatedly assured us that it’s being used only as an investigative lead, but what we see here in Detroit time and time again is it is both being used as the lead and the conclusion.” Studies suggest that facial-recognition algorithms, which have been used to capture suspects in high-profile cases like those connected to January 6, also fail to accurately identify Black people and women, driving up inequalities in arrests, because image-training datasets often lack full diversity. However, according to Mr Mayor, police departments make things even worse by failing to do basic training and common-sense investigative work on top of facial recognition tools. He represents Robert Williams, a Detroit man who was mistakenly arrested for a 2020 theft from a high-end Detroit boutique. A security contractor employed by the store worked with the city and state police and flagged Mr Williams’ name using facial recognition tools. How police came to trust that Williams was the right man reveals the sloppiness of how facial ID tech is used in practice, according to the ACLU attorney. After the theft, police searched a database containing both past photos of Mr Williams and his present-day driver’s license. ‘It picks out 486 people who are the most likely perpetrators; not a single one of them is his current driver’s license, even though his current driver’s license is in the database that was searched,’’ Mr Mayor said. “That seems like an obvious exculpatory fact, the kind of thing that would lead you to say if you were actually thinking, this isn’t the right guy.” When these dubious matches are then used to build a line-up, questionable police work attains the gloss of near-fact, and witnesses choose from a group of people who may have no credible tie to a crime that took place but still look something like the person who did. “This is not me,” Mr Williams told police during his investigation, according to The New York Times. “You think all Black men look alike?” The father of two, after asking a local police voluntarily stop using facial recognition technology, sued the DPD in 2021. “This technology is dangerous when it doesn’t work, which is what the cases in Detroit are about. It’s even more dangerous when it does work. It can be used to systematically surveillance when we come and go from every one of the places that are important in our private lives,” the ACLU attorney said. “I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that departments elsewhere right now are not making the same mistakes.” ‘A force multiplier for police racism’ Detroit isn’t the only place grappling with the impacts – and errors – of this technology. In Louisiana, the use of facial recognition technology led to a wrongful arrest of a Georgia man for a string of purse thefts. A man in Baltimore spent nine days in jail after police incorrectly identified him as a match to a suspect who assaulted a bus driver. The Baltimore Police Department ran nearly 800 facial recognition searches last year. Those cases and others have added to a growing list of misidentified suspects in a new era of racial profiling dragnets fuelled by tech that is rapidly outpacing police and lawmakers’ ability to fix it. Facial recognition software often is “a force multiplier for police racism,” worsening racial disparities and amplifying existing biases, according to Mr Cahn. It can spur a vicious cycle. Black and brown people are already arrested at disproportionate rates. These arrests mean they are more likely to enter a database of faces being analyzed and used for police investigations. Then, error-prone facial recognition technology is used to comb these databases, often failing to identify or distinguish between Black and brown people, particularly Black women. “So the algorithms are biased, but that’s just the start, not the end of the injustice,” Mr Cahn says. Such technologies, advocates warn, are embedded in wider mass surveillance programmes that often lack robust public oversight. In New York City, law enforcement agencies relied on facial recognition technology in at least 22,000 cases between 2016 and 2019, according to Amnesty International. New York City’s Police Department spent nearly $3bn growing its surveillance operations and adding new technology between 2007 and 2019, including roughly $400m for the Domain Awareness System, built in partnership with Microsoft to collect footage from tens of thousands of cameras throughout the city, according to an analysis from STOP and the Legal Aid Society. The NYPD has failed to comply with public disclosure requirements about what those contracts – from facial recognition software to drones and license plate readers – actually include, according to the report. Until 2020, that money was listed under “special expenses” in the police budget until passage of the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act. The following year, more than $277m in budget items were listed under that special expenses programme, the report found. “We’ve seen just concerted pushback from police departments against the sort of oversight that every other type of government agency has because they don’t want to be held accountable,” according to Mr Cahn. “If we treated surveillance technology vendors the way we treated other technology vendors, it would be like Theranos – police would be arresting some of these vendors for fraud rather than giving them government contracts,” he added. “But there is no accountability.” On 7 August, 2020, New York City Police Department officers in riot gear launched a six-hour siege outside Derrick Ingram’s Hell’s Kitchen apartment. Mr Ingram – a racial justice organiser who is embroiled in a federal lawsuit against the NYPD – was surrounded by more than 50 officers after he allegedly shouted into an officer’s ear at a protest earlier that summer. Police insisted they had a warrant on assault charges, but couldn’t produce one when Mr Ingram asked them to, according to his suit. The whole encounter, in which the NYPD deployed snipers, drones, helicopters, and police dogs, began with facial recognition technology. “To say that I was terrified is an understatement – I was traumatized, I still am,” Mr Ingram later testified. “I fear deep down in my core that if I opened my door to those officers, my life would be swiftly taken.” To identify Mr Ingram as a potential suspect, NYPD relied on facial recognition software “as a limited investigative tool, comparing a still image from a surveillance video to a pool of lawfully possessed arrest photos,” according to a police statement, adding that “no one has ever been arrested solely on the basis of a computer match.” The software pulls from a massive internal database of mugshots to generate possible matches, according to the department. Civil rights groups and lawmakers criticized the department’s use of facial recognition – initially hailed as a tool to crack down on violence offenders – for being deployed to suppress dissent, and triggering a potentially lethal police encounter at Mr Ingram’s home. As for Ms Woodruff in Detroit, she hopes her experience can show the dangers of relying too heavily on facial recognition technology. “It may be a good tool to use, but you have to do the investigative part of using that, too,” she said. “It’s just like everything else. You have your pieces that you put together to complete a puzzle.” Her life would’ve been a whole lot different, she said, if “someone would’ve just taken the time to say, ‘OK, stop, we’re going to check this out, let me make a phone call.’” Read More Detroit police changing facial-recognition policy after pregnant woman says she was wrongly charged White House science adviser calls for more safeguards against artificial intelligence risks How a Drake concert put NYPD’s ‘arsenal’ of surveillance technologies under the spotlight

Xzibit likes to stick with what he knows. In this case, it is cannabis.

He seems to be saying Sweden cannot join Nato if Turkey cannot join the EU, writes Paul Adams.

UD Las Palmas return home on Friday night after four weeks away, welcoming Getafe in the curtain-raiser for the weekend's action in LaLiga EA Sports. Their play

From tiny quadcopters buzzing over front-line trenches with cameras and grenades to flying bombs lugging warheads weighing dozens of kilogrammes (pounds) into Kyiv and Moscow, drones have marked the...

Asian stock markets are poised to open lower following declines across the board in the US as inflation

Ouch.

By Andrew Chung (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday backed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Global Inc's bid to halt customer

Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson is ready for the challenge a midfield overhaul will bring next season and is confident he and the team can rediscover the consistency which will allow them to close the gap to Manchester City. Midfield is the key area which needs a refresh this summer and, with the club confirming on Wednesday the departures of veteran James Milner, Naby Keita and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain – in addition to forward Roberto Firmino – there will be some new faces for the next campaign. Henderson will be 33 by then and entering his 13th season at the club but is relishing the competition which he may face, with Liverpool interested in Brighton’s Argentinian World Cup winner Alexis Mac Allister as one of their options. “I don’t think it’s a rebuild to be honest. I do think there will be new players coming in. A rebuild is changing an entire team – which I don’t think we will be doing,” Henderson, speaking at NHS Charities Together event at a school in Crewe, told the PA news agency. “I think you have a lot of core players in the team that will still be there and are still in great shape to compete and be successful. “But yes, it will need freshening up of course with players leaving and trying to improve the team. “I am sure players will be coming in at some point to give us a boost and freshen things up a bit and hopefully put us in good position come the first game of the season.” On what that means for him personally he added: “It’s always a challenge, especially at Liverpool, there will always be challenges for places and to play games. “That’s the case ever since I came to the club. Come pre-season I’ll be ready for the challenge again. “Motivation never changes really, it is always about improving and being better, individually and as a team. “Always new challenges come along, different things will happen and you will have new challenges throughout the season. I am sure players will be coming in at some point to give us a boost and freshen things up a bit Jordan Henderson on potential summer signings “There is always a challenge in football to improve, to be better and that motivation always stayed the same to be successful. “I’m confident we can reach the levels we are capable of again, definitely. We have shown that over the past six or seven games and it’s about continuing on that path from now until the end of the season and (next season) pick up where we left off hopefully.” Henderson is an ambassador for NHS Charities Together and was at Springfield School in Crewe, which caters for four to 19-year-olds with a range of disabilities and learning difficulties, after they won a prize draw having been involved in the annual NHS Big Tea fundraiser, which this year takes place on the health service’s 75th anniversary on July 5. The England international, who spearheaded the PlayersTogether initiative which encouraged professional footballers to donate to the NHS during the Covid-19 pandemic, has an affinity with the NHS after his father Brian was treated for mouth and throat cancer. “My dad probably wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for the NHS staff, he’d say that himself,” added Henderson. “I’ve got family members who work within the NHS and know how difficult it’s been, especially over the last few years with the pandemic. “I’ve been doing work at different hospitals up and down the country as well and it’s been amazing to see the behind-the-scenes stuff and get to see some of the staff.” Read More Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live Football rumours: PSG weighing up new bid for Man City midfielder Bernardo Silva On this day 2016 – Liverpool lose to Sevilla in Europa League final Man City crush holders to book Champions League final return

News reports in India say that at least four students have died and 60 others have been injured in a stampede during a music festival at a university in southern India

Tottenham Hotspur have rejected Bayern Munich’s latest offer for Harry Kane. Bayern submitted their third offer of the summer for the England captain on Friday and an apparent deadline of midnight was also set by the German club. All weekend passed without any further development but Spurs have now responded on Monday and rejected Bayern’s latest bid, it is understood. Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy was reported to have met with Bayern officials last week, but the clubs remain around £25m apart in their valuation. Friday’s bid was expected to be the final offer made by the Bundesliga champions and it remains to be seen whether or not they will continue their pursuit of Kane. Kane has entered the final 12 months of his contract at Tottenham, but ignored the noise around his future to score four goals in a 5-1 friendly win over Shakhtar Donetsk on Sunday. Dejan Kulusevski set up Kane’s hat-trick strike and hailed the professionalism of his team-mate. “He scored four goals, so very good,” Kulusevski exclaimed. “Nah, he’s unbelievable. Honestly, his mentality, I can learn from him like everybody. He just goes out and performs day in day out. “He’s a true professional. I’m happy I helped him score today but of course we want him to stay and we’ll do everything to make him stay.” Asked whether it would be beneficial to have Kane’s future sorted sooner rather than later, Kulusevski admitted: “I think it would. On the other hand, you can only control what you can control. We players cannot do anything about it. “We work our hardest, try to stay ready and the players that manage it, it’s up to them.” This latest twist in the Kane saga increases the likelihood that the forward will feature in Sunday’s Premier League opener at Brentford. Before Tottenham make the trip across the capital, Postecoglou will take his squad to Barcelona on Tuesday for their final pre-season match this summer. It will be another opportunity for Postecoglou to get his players attuned to his front-foot, progressive style of football and Kulusevski, after being accustomed to a pragmatic and counter-attacking approach under Antonio Conte previously, is relishing the attacking brand brought in. “It is fun actually. I love it,” he said. “You have to be physically very good, I love that too. I’m enjoying having a lot of ball higher on the pitch, so I’m very grateful to have him (Postecoglou). “I like him a lot. Also at half-time he was very angry because we stopped playing for five minutes and you cannot be like that. “You have to play always. Just because you’re tired, you (can’t) let them have the ball. Things happen like that. So I like him a lot and I’m looking forward to improving under him.” Kulusevski did concede there will be an adjustment period for Tottenham under Postecoglou’s new bold style. He said: “Everything takes time in life, but the thing is we really, really have to believe in it. It’s not enough if he’s trying to make us believe. We all have to do it. “But we’re in a good way, I think. This was the first game when we played 90 minutes. We’re happy, we ran a lot. It was quite good. “Last season, maybe we scored one and then we tried to protect the result. So, of course we have to improve but second half was very, very good. “He (Postecoglou) said we always have to play. Don’t shoot away the ball, don’t stop pressing, don’t waste time. Always play, play the same and don’t think about the score or the time. Just play and have fun. “We all want to score much more. When we go 1-0, we want to score the second, not back off. So, we all want to score much more.” Read More Dejan Kulusevski vows to ‘do everything’ to keep Harry Kane at Tottenham Postecoglou aims ‘deadline’ dig at Bayern over Kane transfer saga Harry Kane puts speculation to one side with four goals in Tottenham friendly Gary Lineker worried about Tottenham’s campaign with or without Harry Kane Bayern awaiting Tottenham response on ‘final’ offer for Harry Kane James Maddison wants ‘world’s best number nine’ Harry Kane to stay at Spurs

President Joe Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have developed a relationship based on mutual respect of their scrappy backgrounds and a pragmatism about their shared challenges