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 • 1 month ago

397 198 1 month ago

news.sky.com

WarOnPrivacy• 1 month ago

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• 1 month ago

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• 1 month ago

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• 1 month ago

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.

pjc502• 1 month ago

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.

thatguy09002• 1 month ago

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

RobotToaster• 1 month ago

15 years ago an Israeli company was able to manufacture fake DNA evidence https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/science/18dna.html

yardstick• 1 month ago

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.

aorloff3• 1 month ago

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

ChrisMarshallNY5• 1 month ago

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.

asdff8• 1 month ago

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• 1 month ago

Big difference between that and writing an AI prompt.

mukbangpervert2• 1 month ago

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.

Arodex4• 1 month ago

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.

croes2• 1 month ago

How many people could do that?

How long did it take?

Now it’s a lot easier and faster

testing22321• 1 month ago

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.

pjc502• 1 month ago

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

defrost• 1 month ago

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• 1 month ago

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• 1 month ago

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

happymellon• 1 month ago

Some people still believe in polygraphs.

tim333• 1 month ago

It'll no doubt shift the probabilities but people have always lied and faked data. With video coming out of Ukraine there are a lot of fake things but beyond AI glitches you can check who the source is, if it correlates with known events and so on.

radicaldreamer• 1 month ago

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

madaxe_again• 1 month ago

Over all time? Probably tens of millions.

gcr2• 1 month ago

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

Terr_2• 1 month ago

Especially if law enforcement uses Parallel Construction [0], lying to the court about the process taken.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

cadamsdotcom4• 1 month ago

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.

tyingq• 1 month ago

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• 1 month ago

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.

gdulli• 1 month ago

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

duped• 1 month ago

Forensics is the art of manufacturing evidence to convict people.

Ok that's a bit aggressive, but it's important to understand the limits of forensic science, the broken incentives, and systemic lack of rigor in the application of various analyses and products to inculpate/exculpate suspects after the fact.

tim-tday• 1 month ago

Maybe use the word “falsify”?

tamimio• 1 month ago

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• 1 month ago

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• 1 month ago

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• 1 month ago

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

daveshistory• 1 month ago

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

Quarrelsome4• 1 month ago

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.

Jensson4• 1 month ago

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.

jshier2• 1 month ago

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.

7952• 1 month ago

And it is possible that resulting image is a better match to reality than the raw data coming out of the camera .

bentley• 1 month ago

This exact situation came up during the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. The prosecution wanted to present an image of Rittenhouse. It was materially important whether or not the picture depicted Rittenhouse with a raised gun; I looked myself and couldn’t tell because it was a dark picture from a distance (if I remember correctly, it was a still from a drone video). Since the relevant part of the image was so small, the prosecution was going to zoom the photo in on an iPad, but the defense objected on the basis that the iPad zoom algorithms could be inserting detail not present in the original image.

This seemed a plausible enough objection to me. Although a fairly techy guy, I was (and am) not familiar with the specifics of Apple image processing, but at the time I had a vague awareness that Apple had been heavily advertising its use of AI algorithms to improve the quality of images. Whether that affects zooms specifically I don’t know—but it’s not an outlandish question.

The judge did an eminently reasonable thing: he disallowed the zoomed evidence on its own, but allowed it to be re‐entered if the prosecution provided an expert witness to testify that zooming the photo didn’t meaningfully change it. For this, he was pilloried by the tech media.

Take Ars Technica, for example: they used the headline “You shall not pinch to zoom: Rittenhouse trial judge disallows basic iPad feature,” and prominently displayed the judge’s words “I know less than anyone [about technology],” as if the right thing for a judge who knows nothing about technology to do would be to determine the merits of technical evidence on his own rather than ask for an expert witness. It’s not like it would have been hard for the prosecution to find one. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/11/rittenhouse-tria...

Anyone who’s experimented with even non‐AI‐based upscalers knows that changing the algorithm can connect or disconnect catty‐cornered objects, introduce curves, and so on. I was shocked (well, not that shocked, given the heavily partisan interest in the case) that the tech media was so confident zooming an image couldn’t possibly meaningfully change it.

In the end, the image was displayed on a big‐screen TV (which probably used some other upscaling algorithm like bilinear, not that anyone in court was technical enough to point it out). The prosecution asked whether/asserted that Rittenhouse had raised his gun in the image, and Rittenhouse said it was not raised. So the exact details of how the small few pixels in the image got upscaled turned out to be pivotal in the end after all.

thatguy09002• 1 month ago

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• 1 month ago

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

xorcist• 1 month ago

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

cwmoore2• 1 month ago

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

strken• 1 month ago

If we want to solve a problem, intent matters.

totetsu2• 1 month ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMBkWtDAPBY De-crop

inigyou4• 1 month ago

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

jojomodding• 1 month ago

The judge will decide if the evidence is admissible or not.

nullc• 1 month ago

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• 1 month ago

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• 1 month ago

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.

themafia4• 1 month ago

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• 1 month ago

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• 1 month ago

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.

warumdarum2• 1 month ago

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

threecheese• 1 month ago

IME it’s more like 60, which then makes more sense given vision deterioration. Then again most of my over-40 experience is with folks in the tech industry.

amelius• 1 month ago

Probably simply a case of "show me a picture of X with their fingers in the cookie jar".

newaccountman2• 1 month ago

police gonna police

dofm4• 1 month ago

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

There you go.

danielvaughn• 1 month ago

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

dofm4• 1 month ago

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.

sveme3• 1 month ago

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

Iolaum• 1 month ago

it's a feature, not a bug

AnthonyMouse2• 1 month ago

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• 1 month ago

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?

sveme3• 1 month ago

Really good points, thank you for pointing this out. What I'm mostly thinking of is the usage in e.g., social media. There will be efforts to do what you suggest, but for your typical facebook user and scammers, this might help with the more common situations where people use GenAI.

notyourwork• 1 month ago

The general population does not understand technology sufficiently well to set it up correctly, regulate it or use it correctly. Until we educate our population more on technology we will always be in this state.

brador• 1 month ago

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

warumdarum2• 1 month ago

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

Eddy_Viscosity22• 1 month ago

You'd also think that police blatantly lying (with or without AI) in official documents and/or in court under oath would trigger immediate firing and a ban of them ever serving in law enforcement in any capacity ever again. But no.

roryirvine• 1 month ago

If charged, it would likely be as either forgery, perverting the course of justice, or perjury (or perhaps some combination of those) depending on the specifics.

If found guilty at trial, they'd be looking at a prison sentence as the abuse of position aspect would automatically mean high culpability. Expected starting point would be 4 years if an innocent person has been charged or convicted on the basis of the false evidence (which is implied by the report). Perhaps 6-7 years if multiple people have been. Very unlikely they'd ever be able to work in policing or related fields again.

jibal• 1 month ago

Long a police practice (it happened to me) that AI makes easier.

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

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