On March 26, 2022, at around 8:20 a.m., a man in light-blue Nike sweatpants boarded a bus near a shopping plaza in Timonium, outside Baltimore. After the bus driver ordered him to observe a rule requiring passengers to wear face masks, he approached the fare box and began arguing with her. “I hit bitches,” he said, leaning over a plastic shield that the driver was sitting behind. When she pulled out her iPhone to call the police, he reached around the shield, snatched the device, and raced off. The bus driver followed the man outside, where he punched her in the face repeatedly. He then stood by the curb, laughing, as his victim wiped blood from her nose.
By the time police officers canvassed the area, the assailant had fled, but the incident had been captured on surveillance cameras. Officers with the Maryland Transit Administration Police extracted still images from the footage and created a Be on the Lookout bulletin, which was disseminated to law enforcement agencies. It included several pictures of the alleged perpetrator: a slender Black man whose face was partially obscured by a baseball cap and a hoodie. The bulletin was also sent to the state’s attorney’s office of nearby Harford County, and an analyst there decided to run a facial-recognition search. She fed a still image into software that used algorithms to identify faces that had similar characteristics in a vast database of pictures. This “probe photograph” generated a list of potential matches. (Researchers have identified roughly eighty “nodal points” that convey the distinct geometry of a human face.) The match that stood out to the analyst was Alonzo Cornelius Sawyer, a Maryland resident in his mid-fifties.
Esta historia es de la edición November 20, 2023 de The New Yorker.
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Esta historia es de la edición November 20, 2023 de The New Yorker.
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THE SPACE BETWEEN
\"Janet Planet.\" The first time we meet Janet in \"Janet Planet,\" a wondrous début feature from the celebrated playwright Annie Baker, she is standing on a rural road a little way from the camera.
LABOR PAINS
Lucy Kirkwood's \"The Welkin\" assesses women's work.
OFFLINE
Lizzy McAlpine on the power and pitfalls of viral fame.
HEAT RISING
The era of the line cook.
UNSHATTERED
How the philosopher Charles Taylor would reënchant the world.
THE PLAGUE DOCTOR
Anthony Fauci on what's ailing America.
the buggy RODDY DOYLE
There were people at the far end of the beach. Some adults, a lot of children.
GHOSTS ON THE WATER
Glass eels are mysterious creatures—and worth a fortune to those who catch them.
THE CRACKDOWN
Fighting drug gangs, a young President declares war within his own country.
SMALL WONDER
How will nanomachines change our lives?