[HN Gopher] Police officer investigated for using AI to 'create ...
___________________________________________________________________
Police officer investigated for using AI to 'create evidence' in
multiple cases
Author : austinallegro
Score : 318 points
Date : 2026-06-13 19:54 UTC (13 hours ago)
HTML web link (news.sky.com)
TEXT w3m dump (news.sky.com)
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| per ft.com: https://archive.fo/BIOej [The
| Derbyshire Police] declined to give more detail about
| what the evidential material consisted of. The term
| [evidential material] can be used to describe witness
| statements.
| wahern wrote:
| I don't know if it's still the case in the UK, but in the
| common law and still in the US this why all substantive
| evidence, with very rare exception (e.g. dying statements), is
| witness testimony given on the stand. It may seem absurd when a
| witness or expert is given a transcript of an earlier statement
| or report just to recite it, but this is exactly why.
|
| The loophole is all the powers the police and government have
| to more-or-less punish someone before a trial, or even before
| charges.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| i do wonder, that in the age where we have image and video
| creation out of the bag, whether or not this will result in whole
| classes of evidence becoming completely unreliable.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| I suspect so. Tbh, I'm surprised it hasn't happened already
| with the amount of processing that cell phones do on photos,
| with generative fill/expand/perspective change, etc.
|
| We are quickly going to reach a point where any photo or video
| taken on a smartphone is inadmissible by default.
| pjc50 wrote:
| There's a big gap between "theoretically unreliable" and courts
| actually recognizing that, unfortunately. Lots of forensics is
| much more dubious than CSI would have you believe.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| My girlfriends been having me watch law and order svu with
| her and to be honest it doesn't really even seem trustworthy
| with how they want to present it. The psychologist guy
| especially will come up with some wildly detailed assertions
| about who the criminal is based on nothing
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| Are we really going to go to a fictional TV show now?
| CDRdude wrote:
| If a fictional-but-popular TV show treats some kinds of
| evidence as more reliable than they really are, juries
| may be primed to believe in the kind of thing the TV show
| presents as legitimate.
| kalleboo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect
| altmanaltman wrote:
| Sure but lawyers would know that and ensure evidence
| doesn't get presented that way right? There are also a
| lot of other biases that lawyers have to navigate
| through.
|
| Humans are flawed but that doesn't mean everyone in the
| jury thinks TV is real.
| cwillu wrote:
| "Lots of forensics is much more dubious than CSI would
| have you believe." was what was being replied to.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| It affects the jury. If the jury watches tv shows that
| builds the expectation that there is always a bunch of
| ballistics evidence etc and that it is always fool proof
| then they will 1) distrust when there isn't that type of
| evidence (but enough other evidence) and 2) they will
| overvalue the evidence when it exists
| yardstick wrote:
| There used to be - probably still are - cameras that would
| digitally sign all their images. Used in crime scenes? Maybe we
| will end up seeing wider adoption of this, despite the privacy
| implications. Hackers attention then will focus (once again) on
| the certificate supply chain and crypto hardware.
| aorloff wrote:
| I imagine in this age of blockchains you could embed into a
| media file a signature that proved it was no older than the
| timestamp of when it occurred, the digital equivalent of a
| hostage-proof-of-life photo with a recent newspaper
|
| But I don't know of a cryptographic mechanism to ensure that
| a digital image is not more recent than a particular time
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| Interesting, There aren't any newspapers left in my
| country, neither printed nor not printed. The closest you
| can find is the weekly advertising booklet here and there.
| Which is irrelevant now because a computer can either stich
| new content to an old picture, or entirely producing a
| custom picture.
|
| That would be a use case for a block chain. But I still
| don't understand how you are securing the integrity of the
| validity of the certificate stating the authenticity of the
| media. I only understand you are stamping media with a "at
| least as old as [timestamp]
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| If you want to prove that "happened at or after this
| timestamp" you can use a randomness beacon. NIST[0] and
| others publish a random number every N minutes. Embed
| that (or a combination) of those seeds to prove that you
| observed this value. This does not work for the harder
| problem of proving an event happened _before_ a
| timestamp.
|
| [0] https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/interoperable-
| randomness-beac...
| aorloff wrote:
| Thanks - this is the perfect example of how to do this
| appaj wrote:
| Which country no longer has newspapers?
| __del__ wrote:
| wouldn't that be a hash of the image signed by a trusted
| entity and stored on a chain? maybe i'm overlooking why
| this doesn't work
| gcr wrote:
| Publish hash(image) on the blockchain at a verifiable time,
| then publish the image itself.
|
| The image contains the previous block's hash.
|
| Wouldn't this establish both a lower bound and an upper
| bound on the time the image could have been produced?
| bigiain wrote:
| You don't need a blockchain for that. You just need some
| reliable-enough way to publish hash(image) with a
| timestamp - some way that it's infeasible enough as to be
| considered impossible for thepublisher to change the hash
| or the date.
|
| Back when I was on Twitter and following a lot of infosec
| accounts, it was quite common to see tweets that were
| just a hash. Sometimes they'd have an explanation "Zero
| click RCE in Android 10 - {hash}"
|
| In the past I've used gmail for this internally - email a
| hash of something critical (logs, configurations,
| decision docs, etc) to a dedicated gmail account -
| relying on the in feasibility of "faking" the date/time
| once it's onb Google's servers.
|
| The important thing here would be to make sure those
| hashes are published somewhere where its technically
| infeasible for the police to change it after the fact, so
| not on a platform the police run or p-aid for (or that is
| run or paid for by an organization that the police can
| request or coerce the operators to make changes).
| XorNot wrote:
| You literally just need several oracles which sign hashes
| at the time they receive them and record that fact.
|
| As a community service you need them to have enough scale
| that no individual hash or source can be tampered with
| without being likely to become known as unreliable to
| everyone else as well ala certificate transparency
| records.
|
| (You could probably just bootstrap let's encrypt for this
| - issuing a certificate you use to sign a bunch of data
| would stamp several minimums on the order anything could
| have happened).
| dspillett wrote:
| _> But I don 't know of a cryptographic mechanism to ensure
| that a digital image is not more recent than a particular
| time_
|
| Many (most?) blockchain mechanisms include a timestamp in
| each transaction on the chain, so while multiple records
| from the same owner prove little (the timestamps could be
| faked over a given period of time) the interaction with the
| wider network and the chain would give some confidence that
| the record happened between within a small amount of time.
|
| The other possibility, that doesn't require a chain with
| many independent active participants, is to have things
| signed by an external trusted authority. Submit a hash of
| the content and appropriate metadata to them, and have them
| sign it with a signing timestamp. I've considered abusing
| ACME certificates for document signing like that: the hash
| of content (or some signature based upon it) becomes the
| subdomain to sign1 and you get a certificate that even
| after expiry is evidence that the CA saw that value at the
| signing timestamp. Note of the signing will also be in the
| public certificate transparency log. This wouldn't, on its
| own, prove anything about the authenticity of the content,
| that could have been doctored before signing, but it does
| prove that the content+metadata existed at that time (so
| might be more useful in copyright claim type cases, or
| agreed contract situations where all parties have signed
| the content and the signatures are included in the
| metadata, than for proving authenticity).
|
| ----------------
|
| [1] based642-ed with non-alphanumeric characters removed
| and truncated3 to fit or split, so acodha3sf7whsrhtqestkabt
| x0b4bbhyveee0ajnrpqcuxrjjvmhsujgcex.domain.tld or acodha3sf
| 7whsrhtqestkabtx0b4bbhyveee0ajnrpqcuxrjjvmhsujgcex.w5jmmkpm
| yfgshx2jecsfordpnq.domain.tld
|
| [2] names not being case-sensitive drops some of the
| entropy, if that is a concern use a 32-bits-per-character
| encoding instead and have names twice as long
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I worked for a company that made these. We sold expensive
| software to the FBI.
|
| Took about six months for someone to crack the hash.
| deepserket wrote:
| What about a system that saves in some way the hash in a
| Blockchain, and if you, eg, XOR the hash of the video with
| the hash of the previous block you will "certainly" know
| that the video was created between the previous block and
| the block where the hash is saved in. That's a starting
| point.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Might have a point. This was before blockchain.
|
| I suspect that the cops wouldn't like the chain public,
| though.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Like when people discuss voting, I believe a blockchain
| [0] is a terrible pitfall compared to a classic
| distributed database system of _predefined_ nodes run by
| different organizations. For example, imagine a couple
| hundred predefined nodes run by different states, federal
| agencies, etc.
|
| An attacker altering the ledger would still require
| compromising an unreasonably large number of independent
| groups at once, and even then the rest would be able to
| clearly see that some unusual and suspicious event
| occurred.
|
| By limiting membership a bunch of problems simply vanish,
| like long-clearing times, wasting hardware on mining,
| vulnerability to foreign botnets, etc.
|
| [0] A blockchain is distinguished by its core
| requirement, from which a cascade complexity flows:
| Uncontrolled node membership. Don't be fooled by people
| pitching "private blockchain", its a contradiction in
| terms designed to rehabilitate hype, like "multi-sample
| Theranos test" or a bicycle as "Segway passively
| stabilized inline wheel model."
| girvo wrote:
| You just described IBM's whole Hyperledger Fabric thingy.
| I worked with it once upon a time, with the biggest
| insurance companies in my country where they plus a
| regulator all ran nodes.
| mcapodici wrote:
| This sort of chain doesn't need PoW I take it, just a
| very secure police server to sign blocks.
| inigyou wrote:
| And it couldn't be run by the police or any of their
| friends, since they're the adversary.
| dindunuf wrote:
| that does nothing to verify authenticity
| teravor wrote:
| it does something, sometimes. it pushes the required
| fabrication timeline back.
|
| if it is mandated that every photo or video taken for the
| possible use in evidence is notarized at the time of
| acquisition, any fabrication would necessitate total
| premeditation. that is, the fabricators would need to
| know ahead of time what they were pursuing and what
| evidence they would need. this seems like a very costly
| barrier.
|
| for example, altering security footage would require some
| fantastical elements: a real-time system of ingesting
| real footage and altering it in real-time to slip it into
| the notarization pipeline within the error margins.
|
| requiring that any equipment that produces acceptable
| evidence stream commitment hashes in real-time to public
| append-only repositories would be an enormous step
| forward.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Now sell them version 2.
| EPWN3D wrote:
| "Crack the hash"? Does this mean you were employing some
| novel hashing algorithm and relying on its secrecy? If so
| your employer were never serious about security in the
| first place. Hardware attestation is more or less a solved
| problem, and that solution does not involve secret
| algorithms.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Eh. It was some kind of hash of the image. I was not
| involved in that project, so can't tell you exactly how
| it worked, but the images were "signed," and someone
| figured out how to "re-sign" an altered image.
|
| I think it was a fairly well-known technique.
| XorNot wrote:
| Which still sounds like your employer was simply
| incompetent because why was any type of perceptual
| hashing scheme even involved?
|
| Signing digital data with hardware secure tokens is a
| commodity capability in the iPhone many of HNs users are
| reading this site with.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| I think this has been around for not so long
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Authenticity_Initia
| tiv...
| XorNot wrote:
| Sure but conceptually no one should've been able to crack
| any hashing scheme anyone half-way decent at their job
| could come up. SHA256 is the default and it's unbroken.
| Even SHA1 has scant few known collisions. So like...what
| the heck were they hashing and how that anyone was able
| to crack it?
| phreeza wrote:
| Maybe its more like the hash was a well known secure hash
| but someone managed to extract the salt/private
| key/signing certificate from the camera?
| asdff wrote:
| You should see what people were capable of in the darkroom, let
| alone before all this. You could always manipulate imagery ever
| since there was imagery to manipulate.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Big difference between that and writing an AI prompt.
| asdff wrote:
| Not really. End result is the same: manipulated image.
| pyth0 wrote:
| Are we really pretending like the effort to do something
| doesn't affect how often that thing occurs?
| asdff wrote:
| Are we acting like that was ever a limiting factor
| towards disseminating propaganda in the analog age?
| pyth0 wrote:
| No obviously not. But this is silly framing because there
| are so many things we do because it increases the effort
| for bad actors to do bad things. We close and lock our
| doors not because it prevents break-ins, but because that
| is a barrier that makes breaking in more inconvenient.
| mukbangpervert wrote:
| We've gone from highly skilled people being able to forge
| some specific photos and documents using substantial
| time/energy/resources, to any asshole being able to generate
| realistic full-motion video in minutes.
|
| I get that there is a certain type of moron who thinks that
| the collapse in cost of misinformation has no harm... but all
| you've done is announce to the world that you are a moron.
| asdff wrote:
| It is really not any different. People would throw a hubcap
| in the air and pitch it as a UFO photo and idiots would
| latch on to that. You could take a photo of the empire
| state building and use a double exposure to make it look
| like you were king kong. Kids were doing this sort of
| stuff. Stop motion home movies where you'd look like you
| were levitating or your head got cut off.
|
| It always comes down to provenance.
| mukbangpervert wrote:
| People are just lining up to announce that they're
| fucking idiots.
| Arodex wrote:
| This is why:
|
| - the whole roll of negatives was prime evidence;
|
| - police forces were one of the biggest users of Polaroid
| instant film.
|
| And moreover, who had a darkroom and the skills to edit
| substantially a picture?
|
| Whereas here we have nobodies being able to generate pixel-
| perfect fake "evidence" from the computers they already have.
| asdff wrote:
| Plenty of people. If you have running water, some tape, and
| trashbags, you too could have a darkroom.
|
| https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/objects/objects@exhib
| i...
|
| The roll itself can be manipulated too. Most of the
| techniques used in modern photoshop are basically 1:1 carry
| overs of darkroom processes. Layers, dodge and burn,
| masking, etc.
|
| There was a time you could take this class in highschool.
| Arodex wrote:
| You try to equate several days of work, specialized
| equipment and knowledge with typing a text in a webpage.
|
| Have fun keeping making bad faith arguments alone.
| themafia wrote:
| You can burn negatives. You can fake polaroids, really,
| just think about how a camera itself must operate and
| you'll see why instantly. Darkrooms used to be far more
| common before digital photography my Junior and High school
| both had them.
|
| What makes evidence "pixel perfect?" What digital
| photographs don't have to involve a chain of custody?
| Literally the first question the defense will ask is "how
| did you get this picture." If you say you pulled from a
| security system they can just go ask for the originals.
| This happens all the time.
|
| Where people are getting confused is it's almost never
| _one_ piece of evidence that's used to convict you;
| although, it may be a single piece of evidence which
| convinces your attourney to railroad you into a plea deal.
| croes wrote:
| How many people could do that?
|
| How long did it take?
|
| Now it's a lot easier and faster
| asdff wrote:
| Plenty could.
|
| https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/objects/objects@exhib
| i...
| croes wrote:
| Compared to now
|
| https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS
| testing22321 wrote:
| I'm still shocked we have not seen an extremely convincing AI
| video of a famous person or world leader announcing something
| huge like UBI or WW3 or aliens.
|
| Surely it's just a matter of time.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Oh, I assumed they were already out there in the sea of slop
| like the Iran Lego propaganda tiktoks.
| defrost wrote:
| They're out there, recommending scam investments / crypto
| coins more often than major world events.
|
| Meta, for one, is keen to bury such things and avoid
| responsibility for ad contents:
| https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-17/andrew-forrest-
| battle...
| Lammy wrote:
| The end-game is that people will willingly surveil themselves
| 24/7 on behalf of The System because that will be the only way
| to prove what they didn't do.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Ah yes training the AI with more data to represent me even
| more accurately.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| I wonder how many people have been unjustly imprisoned between
| planted evidence, made up evidence, and illegal parallel
| construction...
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Over all time? Probably tens of millions.
| gcr wrote:
| Here in the US? Probably a large double-digit percentage of
| cases imo...
| Terr_ wrote:
| Especially if law enforcement uses Parallel Construction [0],
| lying to the court about the process taken.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| > large double-digit percentage
|
| This is a very very intense claim, and if true, would
| represent a monumental institutional failure across hundreds
| or even thousands of disparate organizations.
|
| Do you have any data to support your hunch?
|
| Strong claims require strong evidence.
| lokar wrote:
| I don't know the numbers, but DNA exonerations give a bit
| of a natural experiment (where testable evidence was
| preserved).
| jasonfarnon wrote:
| They give a floor, and that floor is too small to be
| useful.
| Arodex wrote:
| Police in the United States is already in a state of
| "institutional failure"...
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| "Police in the United States" is not a monolith.
|
| It's easy to say things that sound true on the surface,
| but even if true, it's still irresponsible to say them on
| the back of a hunch.
| nixon_why69 wrote:
| It's more monolithic than you would think due to shared
| culture over the internet. There's a whole narrative
| about sheepdogs (them), sheep (us) and wolves (the bad
| guys).
| jyounker wrote:
| When DNA matching was introduced, we discovered that at
| minimum 10% of people on death row were innocent. Death row
| cases are among the most litigated and examined cases. So,
| 10% is a reasonable floor, and we're already in double
| digits.
| peyton wrote:
| > This reasonably sets a floor
|
| I disagree wrt reasonableness. It's just too big a leap.
| There are a lot of crimes, and not many land you on death
| row.
| halestock wrote:
| Hoo boy, welcome to the history of the United states.
| brookst wrote:
| The observation was that death row represents the highest
| level of scrutiny, and still had 10% false positives for
| guilt.
|
| Is there any argument that less-scrutinized cases would
| have a _lower_ level of false convictions?
| bluGill wrote:
| The 10% claim has been refuted.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| That stat is off by a couple orders of magnitude. The
| total number of death penalty convictions overturned by
| DNA evidence is 29 (as of 2025). There are a couple
| thousand death row inmates right now, and the denominator
| here is all the people who were on death row in the last
| 20+ years. That's a rate of significantly <1%.
|
| https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/first-death-row-exoneration-
| inv...
| bouncycastle wrote:
| it doesn't matter if it's 29 or 2900. Even 1 is wrong.
| wyldberry wrote:
| The commenter isn't litigating that claim, they are
| litigating the claim that at least 1 out of 10 of those
| on death row were false.
| golem14 wrote:
| Shouldn't the denominator be the number of people
| actually executed ? 691 in the last 20 years, for
| instance ?
| jasonfarnon wrote:
| "we discovered that at minimum 10% of people on death row
| were innocent"
|
| How did we do that? I never heard this: certainly 10% of
| people on death row weren't exonerated by DNA? This is
| some kind of shaky extrapolation I assume?
| themafia wrote:
| When they choose the "DNA loci" to do SRT "matching" in
| the first place they convinced themselves it was a unique
| fingerprint and there never would be any duplicates in
| the database.
|
| It only took a few years.
|
| They've since changed and expanded the standard "DNA
| loci" to compensate.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| If you believe parallel construction should be illegal (it
| sure seems like it is unconstitutional to me), then 100% of
| prosecutions that rely on it are unjust. I don't think
| anyone truly knows how common it is, though, and that's by
| design. Double-digits wouldn't shock me at all.
| rvnx wrote:
| Shouldn't it be the exact opposite here ? The burden of
| proof is the other way around.
|
| The big claim is here: the state has grandiose claims that
| the overwhelming majority is fair, but there is no proof of
| it.
|
| Therefore the state should prove that more than 90% of the
| cases are legitimate, fair, not coerced, and not motivated
| by the pressure to interrupt the proceedings.
|
| 97% of people choose plea deals or out-of-court settlement,
| it is a huge amount.
|
| It means that in real practice, not imaginary internet,
| people who face court consider that justice is a big
| machine that can crush you no matter if you are innocent or
| not.
|
| In the best case you are acquitted at the end, but you are
| guaranteed to bear the financial burden, fear and stress as
| a punishment.
|
| Being held in jail before trial is a very convincing reason
| to plea deal too.
|
| It's a system engineered to make pleading the only
| reasonable option, no matter if you did anything or not.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > Shouldn't it be the exact opposite here ? The burden of
| proof is the other way around
|
| That's the rule for criminal court in the US, but each of
| us is free to pick his own standard for his own purposes.
| jasonfarnon wrote:
| That is true--the checks and balances the founding
| fathers fought so hard for were thrown out the window
| with overlegislation and expansion of prosecutorial
| discretion in 20th century. To make a convincing argument
| that "double digits" of cases involve fabricated
| evidence, you still need to explain why prosecutors would
| engage in fraud at this massive scale. Just laziness?
| Collecting scalps? The incentives run that way in some
| limited cases, e.g., prosecutor up for election, post-
| reconstruction south. But you need some explanation
| there.
| inigyou wrote:
| They get rewarded based on winning cases?
| jasonfarnon wrote:
| Yeah, again, there are some incentives to fabricate
| evidence like career advancement. Now why should those,
| on a mass scale, outweigh disincentives like getting
| caught in an adversarial process and (presumably) some
| qualm about regularly convicting innocents and regularly
| letting guilty parties run free in communities. Easy to
| argue in particular cases but I haven't heard the basis
| for a trend.
| inigyou wrote:
| What adversarial process? If the prosecutor loses the
| case, the defendant doesn't go to jail but still receives
| a very big punishment and the prosecutor loses nothing.
| And prosecutors never prosecute themselves for false
| prosecution.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > (presumably) some qualm
|
| This sounds like you're imagining how prosecutors as a
| group sort of feel about things, generally, and that this
| notion you've thought of outweighs the demonstrable real-
| world system where prosecutors are awarded for
| convictions, full stop.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| A burden of proof is associated with an individual claim.
| There's no "burden of proof in the other direction" -
| what you've actually done is created a second burden of
| proof and also - worse - attempted to distract from the
| original point.
|
| It is disingenuous to weasel out of proving one claim by
| making another, or saying "look over here"
|
| Also, outrageous claims in opposite directions can both
| be bullshit.
| godwinson__4-8 wrote:
| On what basis is it an outrageous claim? You think the
| number is closer to 0? That sounds like a more outrageous
| claim to me.
| Jensson wrote:
| That is like claiming that double digit percentage of
| software bugs and vulnerabilities were intentionally put
| there by malicious software engineers. Its outrageous to
| claim its that high.
|
| Even single digit percent is hard to believe, but its
| possible, but double digits you are talking China or
| Russia levels of state corruption and even there I doubt
| its that high.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| ~~Please point to the place where I said your claim was
| outrageous.~~
|
| Edit; upon closer examination. I did imply in my last
| paragraph that your claim was outrageous. Bit of a gaffe
| considering I'm the agitator here. My apologies.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| A few years ago, one of my coworkers was arrested for a
| domestic violence complaint. Looking into his case, I found
| an extremely specific lurid description of the allegations
| -- and then I found the same lurid description copy/pasted
| to every other person recently arrested for the same crime.
| I'm probably getting the specific terms wrong, but I did
| click through to see it on a government website, because my
| first suspicion was the aggregator, but no, the police just
| had a boilerplate story full of specifics which could not
| possibly apply to each and every person they carelessly
| slapped it onto. This absolutely blew my mind at the time,
| but it fits with smaller subsequent observations. In any
| case: a double digit percentage of institutional failure
| does not upset my priors about how carefully the police
| operate.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Why did you "look into the case of your coworker"?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| You wouldn't be curious?
| xstas1 wrote:
| Can you put some of the text in a comment here?
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| The complaint would be by the courts, not the police.
| chaps wrote:
| An important thing you should recognize: the judicial
| system is painfully nontransparent in such a way that even
| figuring this sort of thing takes an _extensive_ amount of
| time and is often even impossible. I 've personally gone
| down a similar route (did some journalism for a bit) by
| trying to understand how shotspotter is used in
| prosecution, many of which resulted in false arrests and
| many, many years of life lost across all the people
| arrested falsely from it.
|
| If you would like to begin trying to answer these, I
| recommend starting with submitting some FOIAs. Considering
| your stance seems to be that you won't believe what others
| are telling you -- I promise you that you'll be surprised.
| vitally3643 wrote:
| We have the highest proportion of imprisoned citizens in
| the world.
|
| This is done because there's an exception in our
| constitution for slavery "as punishment for a crime" and
| well all know that capitalism _loves_ slave labor.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Do you have any exposure to the criminal "justice" system
| in the USA?
| themafia wrote:
| It's actually an institutional success since prison labor
| is so often utilized in the United States. The truth is
| they're just lying to you.
| tyingq wrote:
| Consider all of that can be used for forced confessions and
| forced plea bargains also. In those cases, the "evidence"
| doesn't even need to exist at all, or be on the record in any
| way.
| reactordev wrote:
| Let alone all it takes is a photo and a voice clip of 10sec
| to create an imitation of that person confessing to whatever
| your heart desires.
| rvnx wrote:
| An old phone book is enough.
| simcop2387 wrote:
| Hows wolfie doing?
| rvnx wrote:
| it's max
|
| aren't you an imposter ?
| gdulli wrote:
| Sadly, there's more evil and more laziness/incompetence in the
| world that's being accelerated by AI than there is good.
| tim-tday wrote:
| Maybe use the word "falsify"?
| tamimio wrote:
| Can we know the motivation? Will it get them a bonus at the end
| of the year? Was it something common in the cases, maybe similar
| victims or something else?
| delichon wrote:
| I'd wager that it was just a shortcut to getting his work done.
| That banal motive is why we've seen an explosion of these cases
| and why they won't stop.
| constableclaude wrote:
| The headline evokes ideas of creating a video of a suspect
| perpetrating the crime but what I think is much more likely is
| the police officer used AI to enhance an image in a way that they
| considered innocuous, e.g: a photo was blurry so they "enhanced"
| it. Since "enhancing" is letting AI fill in the gaps it would be
| using AI to "create evidence".
|
| Regardless of what they did, tampering with evidence is
| completely unacceptable and should result in their dismissal and
| conviction but I don't think the story will transpire to be as
| attention grabbing. A well meaning idiot could convince
| themselves that enhancing evidence is somehow justifiable whereas
| it would be almost impossible for even the most corrupt moron to
| justify creating evidence out of thin air.
|
| Creating evidence out of thin air would be ridiculous because
| evidence is available to the defence who would be able to
| immediately identify if an image or video had been created (as
| the defendant would be able to recognize what they do or did not
| do) whereas "enhancing" an image could be easily spotted by other
| officers. "How come this photo is clearer than the last time I
| saw it?" "Oh I ran it through ChatGPT to clean it up! Neat, eh?
| Just like on CSI!"
| Chinjut wrote:
| Yes, let's please give police officers the copious (cop-ious?)
| benefit of the doubt they have earnt.
| daveshistory wrote:
| Honestly, I didn't tell it to add that gun to the picture, it
| did that on its own!
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| you're quite right, every single one of them is actively
| trying to kill each and every one of us. To consider any
| other possibility would be hysterical.
| hiddencost wrote:
| ... Police in the united states have more than a century of
| flagrant misconduct under their belts. They protect their
| own, they almost never face consequences for killing
| people, they are frequently corrupt, they are frequently
| biased.
|
| Here's a couple fun examples:
|
| https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2026-06-05/boston-law-
| enforc...
|
| https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/la-is-
| investigating...
| dofm wrote:
| To be fair, this is Derbyshire in England. They are often
| a bit overkeen but they are not exactly Homan Square.
|
| I think there have been less than two dozen police
| involved killings in the whole of the UK in the last six
| years, and that's in a population of seventy million
| people.
|
| It's about 2% of the equivalent US figure (which averages
| 800 per year in 340 million people)
| simulator5g wrote:
| It doesn't make much difference if you perform similar
| practices in a different country. UK police are just like
| American police.
| BellsOnSunday wrote:
| Apart from the bit about killing people, for the most
| part.
| cwmoore wrote:
| I see what you did there[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteresis
| Jensson wrote:
| > what I think is much more likely is the police officer used
| AI to enhance an image in a way that they considered innocuous,
| e.g: a photo was blurry so they "enhanced" it
|
| Doesn't iphones do this by default? The camera isn't actually
| that sharp, instead it fills in the details so it looks sharp,
| and sometimes it adds things that were never there. Can easily
| see it adding a gun in a blurry photo of someone.
|
| So almost everyone uses AI to forge evidence then.
| jshier wrote:
| iPhones, no, there's no AI replacement or synthesis of
| objects from the camera. There were Android phones doing this
| (famously I think it was Samsung where it would replace
| images of the moon with a different image of the moon), and
| the Photos app has AI manipulation features. And most of the
| time, Apple's noise removal algorithm actually removes detail
| from images, most notably making text and straight lines
| wobbly.
| Jensson wrote:
| > iPhones, no, there's no AI replacement or synthesis of
| objects from the camera
|
| This is AI. Its not generative AI if that is what you mean,
| but it is AI altering the image and adding things that
| wasn't there, usually its fine sometimes it fails horribly
| and make the picture totally different.
|
| https://x.com/mitchcohen/status/1476351601862483968
| moonu wrote:
| https://x.com/mitchcohen/status/1476951534160257026?s=20
| The replies explain that it was a leaf obscuring the face
| Jensson wrote:
| But it used AI to stitch that onto the body, a raw camera
| shot wouldn't look like that.
| jshier wrote:
| No, that's not AI in the context you were claiming. They
| use ML techniques and ML-optimized algorithms for their
| image processing, which can be claimed under the general
| AI umbrella, but they certainly aren't generating
| elements of the images captures by the camera app, which
| is what you meant. The leaf example given in sibling
| comment has long been debunked, and it's literally the
| only example of generative content injection claimed for
| the iPhone camera.
| epgui wrote:
| Yes, iphones do process images using AI.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| There is a tremendous amount of cases you can look up where
| cops wholesale fabricate evidence. Why wouldn't they use
| chatgpt to do it as well?
| kubb wrote:
| It matters little what you think, if that's not what happened.
| xorcist wrote:
| That is a lot of words just to say "fabricating evidence".
| cwmoore wrote:
| Their word is evidence and their employer is the prosecution.
| This is the fabric of prosperity.
| dofm wrote:
| FWIW their employer is not the prosecution. UK police don't
| prosecute cases, the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) does.
|
| The word of a police officer, in UK law, is that of any
| other witness. There is a kind of presumption of regularity
| in the courts, but they don't have any sense of qualified
| immunity; they are generally but not universally considered
| not personally liable for negligence but that is not
| guaranteed them.
|
| And unlike police departments in the USA they don't really
| have much latitude to experiment with technology. IMO they
| should be banned from using AI tools that aren't centrally
| provided.
|
| Other than that, yes -- I agree with your general view that
| this is an alarming state of affairs for people in a
| position of trust.
| strken wrote:
| If we want to solve a problem, intent matters.
| inigyou wrote:
| What would the defense do with fabricated evidence? Say that
| evidence is fabricated? Okay, the prosecution will say it's not
| fabricated, now what?
| nullc wrote:
| > but what I think is much more likely
|
| My mind went straight to using the AI to write a statement and
| the AI made stuff up, which would be a nearly guaranteed
| outcome from using existing LLMs for that task, and it's
| exactly the sort of thing that I'm sure many officers are doing
| ... and it could go a fair time before it was discovered.
| tsss wrote:
| If you think the police don't fabricate evidence on the
| regular, simply because their hunch doesn't match the fact or
| because they don't like the suspect, then you are way too
| gullible. Back in the day they just planted a baggie of drugs
| on you.
| justin66 wrote:
| > Back in the day they just planted a baggie of drugs on you.
|
| Thank god that never happens anymore. I'm sure the bodycam
| era has ended all of that misbehavior and one could not
| possibly go to YouTube and find videos of cops in possession
| of that unique blend of corruption and stupidity that would
| lead them to plant drugs while being recorded. _Ahem._
| themafia wrote:
| > it would be almost impossible for even the most corrupt moron
| to justify creating evidence out of thin air.
|
| Yet we have many examples of this precise thing happening. This
| is because the police carry immense credibility when
| testifying. This is also why the "Brady List" exists.
|
| > the defence who would be able to immediately identify if an
| image or video had been created
|
| How? Just pure skill? Again, we can see from appeals court
| proceedings, they miss details all the time. The system of
| "public defense" in the United States is severely lacking.
| sudonem wrote:
| I would be interested in knowing both what kind of fabrication
| occurred, but perhaps I'm not curious about how it was
| discovered?
|
| Did the defense use some sort of tool to debunk? Was it just an
| obvious deepfake etc? Or was it the officer's ineptitude that got
| him caught?
| otherme123 wrote:
| My experiece with whatsapp family groups is that a lot of
| people over 40 can't detect the most obvious AI fakes (e.g.
| Studio Gibli clones, or three handed people), so they share the
| most stupid stuff as it was real, while youngers seem have an
| instinct to detect AI but can't tell exactly why they know.
|
| I can picture a cop fabricating images that are obvious, even
| with a watermark included, while totally convinced that it is
| undetectable.
| warumdarum wrote:
| The ai slop uses movie compositions in whats supossed to be
| handheld shots?
| newaccountman2 wrote:
| police gonna police
| dofm wrote:
| I saw this headline, saw that it was Sky news, thought "oh a
| British policeman? Bet it was Derbyshire police".
|
| There you go.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| As an American, I'm totally out of the loop on this one but it
| sounds interesting. I assume Derbyshire has a reputation?
| dofm wrote:
| They are just rather over-eager and a bit of a law unto
| themselves in a rather silly way; it is Derbyshire police
| that hassled people walking in the open air during COVID,
| including rather excitably harrassing Peak District walkers
| with drones, and enforced rules that were only guidance as if
| they were law (famously asserting that two women walking in
| the fresh air with a coffee was "a picnic").
|
| Them being all super-keen to use AI really fits. Some pillock
| of an officer going too far really fits.
|
| Derbyshire is really safe but they act like it is not.
| sveme wrote:
| Why police (and media) cameras aren't forced to use camera
| hardware signing, aka content credentials, is beyond me.
| Iolaum wrote:
| it's a feature, not a bug
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| It's because they're a scam. Point the camera at a forged image
| with a higher resolution than the camera sensor and it will
| make a signed copy of the unsigned forgery.
|
| That's before getting into the practical problems with securing
| the keys. Every camera by every manufacturer has keys in it and
| the attacker only needs one key from one camera, and _they_ get
| to choose the model? Creating something premised on needing to
| trust something with such a high probability of being
| compromised is worse than nothing, because it allows the
| ensuing forgeries a mechanism to pass themselves off as
| "signed" "real" images.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| But what about if:
|
| ...the signature included the depth measured by the autofocus
| system across the image?
|
| ...or a tiny stereo image was included to capture depth?
|
| ...or a mini video in the ten seconds before and after the
| photo was taken?
|
| ...and the key is in a tamper proof HSM?
|
| ...and the key is deleted the moment the camera detects the
| case being taken apart?
|
| I know that it is a losing battle to try to build such
| hardware when offline attackers have essentially infinite
| time to dismantle even the most elaborate systems -- no such
| thing as an un breakable safe, only how long it takes to
| break into it, etc -- but I feel these are valid counter
| measures, are they not?
| brador wrote:
| This is probably using AI to remove a background or object from
| an image, not a 6 finger perp.
| warumdarum wrote:
| Such a case should trigger a auto revision on all cases said
| officer ever touched.
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