DETENTION ‘IS PRICE WE PAY’: Munroe says wrongful identification and arrest a ‘potential inconvenience’

NATIONAL Security Minister Wayne Munroe. Photo: Moise Amisial

As of Friday, January 19, 2024

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune News Editor

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

NATIONAL Security Minister Wayne Munroe said though facial recognition CCTVs may wrongly identify someone as a criminal, “being arrested on suspicion and being held up to 48 hours is part of the price we pay for living in a free, democratic, orderly society”.

“This is what the prime minister talks about when he talks about potential inconvenience,” he said during yesterday’s Office of the Prime Minister press briefing. Prime Minister Philip “Brave” Davis said on Sunday that more intrusive policing is coming in response to the soaring murder rate. He said the government will install more surveillance technology using facial recognition CCTVs to help with crime detection.

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The New York Times reported facial recognition technology flaws in 2019. The National Institute of Standards and Technology reported that year that the systems falsely identified African-American and Asian faces ten to 100 times more than Caucasian faces. As part of that study, researchers accessed more than 18 million photos of about 8.5 million people from mug shots, visa applications and border-crossing databases in the United States.

Yesterday, Mr Munroe said ordinary eyewitness identification can also lead to arresting the wrong person. He noted that judges inform jurors that visual identification can be mistaken.

“They’re not talking now about a picture that you can freeze, so if you have facial rec where we have a shooting here and we query the system and it says the person who shot the person is at the podium at the OPM press office and they come and pick me up, when they sit me down at some point since the evidence is the original recording, they will look at the original recording and say oh that’s not Munroe,” he said.

“I will be inconvenienced by having been arrested on suspicion, but being arrested on suspicion and being held up to 48 hours is part of the price we pay for living in a free, democratic, orderly society, and so this is what the prime minister talks about when he talks about potential inconvenience.

“So the facial recognition, the artificial intelligence component, could lead to them wrongly identifying you because it looks very close to the person who did it, but when you sit down and now look at the picture, if you ever have to say it’s not you, sorry.”

Mr Munroe described facial recognition technology as a tool that can free the innocent and convict the guilty.

“As we expand the coverage of CCTV footage, the beauty of technology is it could exonerate you just as well as it could implicate you,” he said. “So if someone were wrongly identifying you based on a visual identification, if you don’t have the CCTV, you will get charged because the person will pick you out of a line-up, and we have what the judge says. But if we have the CCTV footage, we’ll be able to stop it, look and be able to say that’s not the person.”

mandela 3 months, 2 weeks ago

The Bahamas is Slowly becoming a free dictatorship.

tell_it_like_it_is 3 months, 2 weeks ago

Mr. Munroe said ordinary eyewitness identification can also lead to arresting the wrong person.
His response is so nonsensical.
So if someone says they witnessed Wayne Munroe committing a crime, then they will arrest him?
When since can you just arrest someone on someone else's word? There's something called EVIDENCE that is needed here!!! SMH

ExposedU2C 3 months, 2 weeks ago

The Bahamian people have allowed these dumber than dumb arseholes to shred all of their protective rights under the Constitution of The Bahamas.

The PLP hierarchy claim to be progressive (it's the first word in the name of their political party) but in reality they are authoritarian and most greedy puppets of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Unfortunately the same holds true for the FNM hierarchy where the first word "Free" in the name of their political party has left and will always leave the enslaved Bahamian people anything but 'free'.

For the last three decades our national elections have been nothing but a charade because the entire political ruling class in our country, whether they be PLP or FNM, are "owned" lock, stock and barrel by the CCP, the foreign alphabet soup agencies (IMF, IDB, etc.) and the ruthlessly corrupt cruise ship enterprises like Royal Caribbean, Carnival, Disney, and so on. This has resulted in an enormously deep chasm between the "haves" and "have nots" in our society today and crime naturally comes with such a great divide, not to mention unchecked illegal immigration.

Nothing will get better until the vast majority of Bahamians come to their senses and realise the futility of seeking to take their country back from all of these corrupt robber barons by casting worthless votes in fake national general elections.

AnObserver 3 months, 2 weeks ago

Do these people think before they speak? 'A 91% deficit isn't anything to worry about.' 'Being randomly arrested and locked up for a few days isn't anything to worry about.'

Porcupine 3 months, 2 weeks ago

Thought the same myself. Nothing more dangerous than idiots in positions of power. Just like we have now.

moncurcool 3 months, 2 weeks ago

NATIONAL Security Minister Wayne Munroe said though facial recognition CCTVs may wrongly identify someone as a criminal, “being arrested on suspicion and being held up to 48 hours is part of the price we pay for living in a free, democratic, orderly society”.

I am sorry, being arrested on suspicion and wrongfully detained is not the price you pay in a democratic society. That is what happens in a dictatorship.

Guess now we understand what this self called new day government is really about.

But this is what the man showed during the 2017 election when he took his finger and told the Bahamian people to kiss his a**.

May Angelou was right: when people show you who they are, believe them.

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