Three of the world’s biggest tech companies cut cords this week with police departments across America that used their facial recognition platforms in what police leaders described as both an uninformed move and public stunt.
IBM told a handful of senators this week that it had shut down its facial recognition and analysis software, becoming the first major corporation to shutter relations with law enforcement following nationwide protests for racial equality and changes to police treatment of black people. The revoked access for police comes after several years of complaints by the public and admissions by tech companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, that systems more often fail to identify people with darker skin than those with lighter skin.
Amazon announced Wednesday a one-year moratorium on police use of its Rekognition facial recognition technology, which it said would give Congress time to put into place rules for law enforcement’s use of such tools. Amazon did not disclose how many of the 18,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide have contracts for its services but said it would allow organizations like the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children to continue using it.
Microsoft stripped access to its facial scanning systems Thursday. The company president, Brad Smith, told a group during a Washington Post event that the sale of facial recognition technology would not be made to U.S. police departments “until we have a national law in place, grounded in human rights, that will govern this technology.”
Ed Hutchinson, president of the National Police Association, said the announcements hurt police because they “aggravate the already common misconception” of how police departments use facial recognition.
“Due in large part to the wild exaggerations made by television and movie depictions, the perception exists that facial recognition is a science like DNA or fingerprints. It is not,” Hutchinson wrote in an email. “That is why facial recognition, like polygraph tests, is not accepted as evidence in criminal trials. The results of a facial recognition search at best produce leads, placing it in the category of pictures drawn by sketch artists and tips from Crime Stoppers.”
“The virtue-signaling consumer tech companies would better serve the public if they stopped disparaging police and admitted to the public they do not provide and the police do not use facial recognition for evidentiary reasons, but rather as potential information to be followed up on, investigated, and proven useful, or not,” Hutchinson added.
Bill Johnson, executive director at the National Association of Police Organizations, accused businesses of overcorrecting by “[throwing] the baby out with the bathwater,” instead of admitting their own systems’ misidentification of a black person could lead law enforcement to pursue an innocent person.
“If there’s problems with it, fix the problem,” Johnson said in a Friday phone call. “Stuff comes out — there’s problems with it. I think there has to be sensitivity when those problems are more likely to identify people if they’re persons of color, but I think if companies are honest about it … people are willing to give the company the benefit of the doubt — willing to believe they are working on it.”
If companies were as concerned as they have acted about the face detectors, other types of uses, like on Facebook or Google, should be suspended as well, according to Johnson.
“The viewpoint of most police at this point is these companies are taking a hiatus now because it’s political pressure that’s been put upon them. In order to perhaps avoid a boycott or keep sales strong in other lines of business,” Johnson said.
Hutchinson said moves showed the “unreliability of working with consumer brands that are vulnerable to public relations campaigns by police critics” and should prompt police to switch to “reliable” partners, including Lumen and Vigilant.
