Detective work is not easy when you are at a crime scene and tasked with finding the culprit. You have to interview people to see if there is a camera, if there is fingerprint dust, and that doesn’t even include all the paperwork.
But these don’t always work – sometimes you have to consult an old Ouija board or pin it to a random black man.
But those tough-time strategies no longer work. At least psychic. The “pin it on a black man” move is still popular. As times change, so does our technology. New police strategy? Draw sketches based on DNA evidence! Check out this now-deleted tweet:
It doesn’t take a geneticist to point out that this is just a 21st century approach to racial profiling—comedians can do the job, too.
That said, if you’re really a big fan of expert testimony, there’s also a geneticist who will point out why this is stupid science, likening a DNA-based perp sketch to phrenology.
Using this technology can be dangerous for everyone, especially black people. Before you accuse me of racial baiting, just look at the data – the fact that black people are wrongly convicted of serious crimes at an alarming rate, not to mention that convicted black boys don’t even exist in Tennessee.
Do you think we’d do better in court if hacked science printouts of our portraits were waving in front of a jury? It’s bad enough that people watch Law and Order so much that they think the lie detector test actually works. Wave his AI-generated similarity and throw enough of the word DNA, and you could get a jury to convict Wayne Brady of stealing chunks of Saturn.
After hours of deliberation and poor PR, the Edmonton Police Department had enough common sense to take down their post and offer a half-apology. You can read it here. While it’s nice to see police departments admit their mistakes, they are Canadians after all. I highly doubt the same goes for the LAPD (they probably just killed a whistleblower), the NYPD (just found a string of shady cops), or the Alabama PD (from Alabama) Do.
For posterity, you can find unedited screenshots of deleted tweets on the next page.
Chris Williams will become Social Media Manager and Assistant Editor of Above the Law in June 2021. Before joining the staff, he worked part-time as Memelord™ on the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis. St. Louis Law School. A former boatbuilder who can’t swim, he has published on critical race theory, philosophy and humor, and enjoys riding a bike, occasionally annoying his peers.You can reach him via email cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and Twitter @WritesForRent.