alt.hn

6/13/2026 at 7:54:55 PM

Police officer investigated for using AI to 'create evidence' in multiple cases

 https://news.sky.com/story/derbyshire-police-officer-investigated-for-using-ai-to-create-evidence-in-multiple-cases-13553661

by austinallegro

6/14/2026 at 1:05:40 AM

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?

by sudonem

6/14/2026 at 6:16:03 AM

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.

by otherme123

6/14/2026 at 8:43:59 AM

The ai slop uses movie compositions in whats supossed to be handheld shots?

by warumdarum

6/14/2026 at 5:10:44 AM

Why police (and media) cameras aren‘t forced to use camera hardware signing, aka content credentials, is beyond me.

by sveme

6/14/2026 at 7:45:15 AM

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.

by AnthonyMouse

6/14/2026 at 8:28:27 AM

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?

by gorgoiler

6/14/2026 at 6:39:07 AM

it's a feature, not a bug

by Iolaum

6/14/2026 at 8:42:41 AM

Such a case should trigger a auto revision on all cases said officer ever touched.

by warumdarum

6/13/2026 at 9:04:58 PM

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.

by bobthepanda

6/13/2026 at 9:13:04 PM

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.

by pjc50

6/14/2026 at 12:08:52 AM

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

by thatguy0900

6/14/2026 at 1:35:12 AM

Are we really going to go to a fictional TV show now?

by assimpleaspossi

6/14/2026 at 7:35:04 AM

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

by victorbjorklund

6/14/2026 at 2:54:32 AM

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.

by CDRdude

6/14/2026 at 5:06:11 AM

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.

by altmanaltman

6/14/2026 at 6:38:51 AM

“Lots of forensics is much more dubious than CSI would have you believe.” was what was being replied to.

by cwillu

6/13/2026 at 9:25:38 PM

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.

by yardstick

6/13/2026 at 9:37:36 PM

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.

by ChrisMarshallNY

6/13/2026 at 9:47:39 PM

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.

by deepserket

6/13/2026 at 10:21:33 PM

that does nothing to verify authenticity

by dindunuf

6/14/2026 at 12:53:17 AM

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.

by teravor

6/13/2026 at 10:17:17 PM

This sort of chain doesn't need PoW I take it, just a very secure police server to sign blocks.

by mcapodici

6/14/2026 at 1:16:30 AM

And it couldn't be run by the police or any of their friends, since they're the adversary.

by inigyou

6/13/2026 at 10:00:24 PM

Might have a point. This was before blockchain.

I suspect that the cops wouldn’t like the chain public, though.

by ChrisMarshallNY

6/13/2026 at 10:29:47 PM

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."

by Terr_

6/14/2026 at 2:33:34 AM

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.

by girvo

6/13/2026 at 10:37:55 PM

"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.

by EPWN3D

6/13/2026 at 10:45:07 PM

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.

by ChrisMarshallNY

6/14/2026 at 4:15:40 AM

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.

by XorNot

6/14/2026 at 5:16:39 AM

I think this has been around for not so long

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Authenticity_Initiativ...

by dzhiurgis

6/14/2026 at 6:49:38 AM

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?

by XorNot

6/14/2026 at 8:26:47 AM

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?

by phreeza

6/13/2026 at 10:05:39 PM

Now sell them version 2.

by lostlogin

6/13/2026 at 9:30:33 PM

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

by aorloff

6/13/2026 at 10:37:35 PM

> 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 acodha3sf7whsrhtqestkabtx0b4bbhyveee0ajnrpqcuxrjjvmhsujgcex.domain.tld or acodha3sf7whsrhtqestkabtx0b4bbhyveee0ajnrpqcuxrjjvmhsujgcex.w5jmmkpmyfgshx2jecsfordpnq.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

by dspillett

6/13/2026 at 9:50:34 PM

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?

by gcr

6/14/2026 at 2:29:09 AM

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).

by bigiain

6/14/2026 at 4:18:32 AM

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).

by XorNot

6/13/2026 at 9:38:32 PM

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

by __del__

6/13/2026 at 9:36:33 PM

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]

by catlikesshrimp

6/13/2026 at 10:25:49 PM

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...

by 3eb7988a1663

6/14/2026 at 6:05:08 AM

Thanks - this is the perfect example of how to do this

by aorloff

6/13/2026 at 10:34:34 PM

Which country no longer has newspapers?

by appaj

6/13/2026 at 10:07:40 PM

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.

by asdff

6/13/2026 at 10:46:52 PM

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.

by Arodex

6/13/2026 at 11:18:06 PM

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@exhibi...

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.

by asdff

6/14/2026 at 8:35:22 AM

You try to equate several days of work, specialized equipment (much more than water and trash bag: you need chemicals, baths, special paper, a projector, plates...) and knowledge with typing a text in a webpage.

Have fun keeping making bad faith arguments alone.

by Arodex

6/14/2026 at 4:27:35 AM

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.

by themafia

6/13/2026 at 10:12:43 PM

Big difference between that and writing an AI prompt.

by olyjohn

6/13/2026 at 11:19:10 PM

Not really. End result is the same: manipulated image.

by asdff

6/13/2026 at 11:37:59 PM

Are we really pretending like the effort to do something doesn't affect how often that thing occurs?

by pyth0

6/13/2026 at 11:44:29 PM

Are we acting like that was ever a limiting factor towards disseminating propaganda in the analog age?

by asdff

6/14/2026 at 2:57:46 AM

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.

by pyth0

6/13/2026 at 10:29:02 PM

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.

by mukbangpervert

6/13/2026 at 11:15:45 PM

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.

by asdff

6/14/2026 at 2:05:25 AM

People are just lining up to announce that they're fucking idiots.

by mukbangpervert

6/13/2026 at 9:09:01 PM

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.

by thewebguyd

6/13/2026 at 10:32:07 PM

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.

by Lammy

6/13/2026 at 10:45:46 PM

Ah yes training the AI with more data to represent me even more accurately.

by LtWorf

6/13/2026 at 10:23:06 PM

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.

by testing22321

6/14/2026 at 6:10:48 AM

Oh, I assumed they were already out there in the sea of slop like the Iran Lego propaganda tiktoks.

by pjc50

6/13/2026 at 8:59:49 PM

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.

by WarOnPrivacy

6/13/2026 at 9:48:15 PM

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.

by wahern

6/14/2026 at 12:05:19 AM

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!”

by constableclaude

6/14/2026 at 12:28:46 AM

That is a lot of words just to say "fabricating evidence".

by xorcist

6/14/2026 at 12:47:23 AM

Their word is evidence and their employer is the prosecution. This is the fabric of prosperity.

by cwmoore

6/14/2026 at 3:24:21 AM

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.

by dofm

6/14/2026 at 3:11:42 AM

If we want to solve a problem, intent matters.

by strken

6/14/2026 at 12:10:26 AM

Yes, let's please give police officers the copious (cop-ious?) benefit of the doubt they have earnt.

by Chinjut

6/14/2026 at 1:34:40 AM

Honestly, I didn't tell it to add that gun to the picture, it did that on its own!

by daveshistory

6/14/2026 at 2:44:17 AM

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.

by Quarrelsome

6/14/2026 at 3:14:28 AM

... 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...

by hiddencost

6/14/2026 at 9:24:21 AM

This is the UK, our cops don't even carry guns.

by Quarrelsome

6/14/2026 at 3:43:03 AM

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)

by dofm

6/14/2026 at 7:01:44 AM

It doesn't make much difference if you perform similar practices in a different country. UK police are just like American police.

by simulator5g

6/14/2026 at 9:23:38 AM

who are exactly the same as the Russki police, right? Bloody hell...

by Quarrelsome

6/14/2026 at 8:17:36 AM

Apart from the bit about killing people, for the most part.

by BellsOnSunday

6/14/2026 at 12:25:41 AM

It matters little what you think, if that’s not what happened.

by kubb

6/14/2026 at 12:32:30 AM

What would the defense do with fabricated evidence? Say that evidence is fabricated? Okay, the prosecution will say it's not fabricated, now what?

by inigyou

6/14/2026 at 12:19:25 AM

> 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.

by Jensson

6/14/2026 at 12:31:54 AM

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.

by jshier

6/14/2026 at 12:38:05 AM

> 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

by Jensson

6/14/2026 at 2:53:37 AM

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.

by jshier

6/14/2026 at 12:50:30 AM

Yes, iphones do process images using AI.

by epgui

6/14/2026 at 12:54:27 AM

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.

by tsss

6/14/2026 at 2:22:16 AM

> 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.

by justin66

6/14/2026 at 12:19:44 AM

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?

by thatguy0900

6/14/2026 at 4:32:59 AM

> 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.

by themafia

6/14/2026 at 12:53:54 AM

> 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.

by nullc

6/13/2026 at 11:07:07 PM

Maybe use the word “falsify”?

by tim-tday

6/14/2026 at 3:17:22 AM

I saw this headline, saw that it was Sky news, thought "oh a British policeman? Bet it was Derbyshire police".

There you go.

by dofm

6/14/2026 at 3:18:56 AM

As an American, I'm totally out of the loop on this one but it sounds interesting. I assume Derbyshire has a reputation?

by danielvaughn

6/14/2026 at 3:28:33 AM

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.

by dofm

6/13/2026 at 9:08:18 PM

I wonder how many people have been unjustly imprisoned between planted evidence, made up evidence, and illegal parallel construction…

by radicaldreamer

6/13/2026 at 9:45:32 PM

Here in the US? Probably a large double-digit percentage of cases imo…

by gcr

6/13/2026 at 10:33:10 PM

> 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.

by cadamsdotcom

6/13/2026 at 10:43:54 PM

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.

by jyounker

6/13/2026 at 11:50:22 PM

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...

by pseudo0

6/14/2026 at 1:02:13 AM

Shouldn't the denominator be the number of people actually executed ? 691 in the last 20 years, for instance ?

by golem14

6/14/2026 at 12:31:02 AM

it doesn't matter if it's 29 or 2900. Even 1 is wrong.

by bouncycastle

6/14/2026 at 1:02:37 AM

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.

by wyldberry

6/14/2026 at 12:06:33 AM

"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?

by jasonfarnon

6/14/2026 at 4:34:47 AM

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.

by themafia

6/13/2026 at 10:49:31 PM

> 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.

by peyton

6/13/2026 at 11:38:27 PM

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?

by brookst

6/14/2026 at 12:05:18 AM

The 10% claim has been refuted.

by bluGill

6/13/2026 at 11:14:13 PM

Hoo boy, welcome to the history of the United states.

by halestock

6/13/2026 at 11:12:30 PM

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.

by rvnx

6/13/2026 at 11:58:22 PM

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.

by jasonfarnon

6/14/2026 at 12:33:48 AM

They get rewarded based on winning cases?

by inigyou

6/14/2026 at 12:50:25 AM

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.

by jasonfarnon

6/14/2026 at 4:38:43 AM

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.

by inigyou

6/14/2026 at 7:45:20 AM

> (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.

by jrflowers

6/13/2026 at 11:30:44 PM

> 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.

by CoastalCoder

6/14/2026 at 12:01:02 AM

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.

by cadamsdotcom

6/14/2026 at 12:10:02 AM

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.

by godwinson__4-8

6/14/2026 at 12:32:49 AM

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.

by Jensson

6/14/2026 at 1:01:44 AM

~~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.

by cadamsdotcom

6/13/2026 at 11:19:08 PM

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.

by smallmancontrov

6/14/2026 at 1:42:06 AM

The complaint would be by the courts, not the police.

by assimpleaspossi

6/14/2026 at 12:07:42 AM

Why did you "look into the case of your coworker"?

by gerdesj

6/14/2026 at 12:24:45 AM

You wouldn't be curious?

by ceejayoz

6/14/2026 at 1:12:18 AM

Can you put some of the text in a comment here?

by xstas1

6/13/2026 at 11:46:23 PM

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.

by chaps

6/13/2026 at 11:07:36 PM

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.

by dpkirchner

6/13/2026 at 10:41:21 PM

Police in the United States is already in a state of "institutional failure"...

by Arodex

6/13/2026 at 10:57:17 PM

“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.

by cadamsdotcom

6/14/2026 at 12:28:12 AM

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).

by nixon_why69

6/13/2026 at 10:38:34 PM

I don’t know the numbers, but DNA exonerations give a bit of a natural experiment (where testable evidence was preserved).

by lokar

6/13/2026 at 11:50:04 PM

They give a floor, and that floor is too small to be useful.

by jasonfarnon

6/14/2026 at 12:09:55 AM

Do you have any exposure to the criminal "justice" system in the USA?

by adastra22

6/14/2026 at 12:07:58 AM

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.

by vitally3643

6/14/2026 at 4:36:07 AM

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.

by themafia

6/13/2026 at 10:42:49 PM

[dead]

by giancarlostoro

6/13/2026 at 10:10:13 PM

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.

by tyingq

6/13/2026 at 10:58:48 PM

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.

by reactordev

6/13/2026 at 11:13:01 PM

An old phone book is enough.

by rvnx

6/13/2026 at 11:30:10 PM

Hows wolfie doing?

by simcop2387

6/13/2026 at 11:41:16 PM

it's max

aren't you an imposter ?

by rvnx

6/13/2026 at 10:20:28 PM

Sadly, there's more evil and more laziness/incompetence in the world that's being accelerated by AI than there is good.

by gdulli

6/13/2026 at 9:33:15 PM

Over all time? Probably tens of millions.

by madaxe_again

6/14/2026 at 6:39:05 AM

This is probably using AI to remove a background or object from an image, not a 6 finger perp.

by brador

6/13/2026 at 11:30:41 PM

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?

by tamimio

6/13/2026 at 11:45:07 PM

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.

by delichon

6/14/2026 at 7:18:31 AM

[flagged]

by jrsbailbond

6/13/2026 at 11:36:21 PM

[dead]

by sieabahlpark

6/13/2026 at 9:40:24 PM

[flagged]

by appleslicemusic

6/14/2026 at 1:11:45 AM

[flagged]

by TurdF3rguson

6/14/2026 at 1:53:16 AM

police gonna police

by newaccountman2