In recent years, critics have repeatedly said that facial recognition technology is not accurate enough and too intrusive for use by law enforcement agencies.
Fueled by concerns about false positives, privacy, and civil rights, some lawmakers and civil liberties groups have renewed their efforts to limit the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement. Lawmakers and critics talked about apparent shortcomings of the technology during a July 13 hearing in the House Judiciary Committee.
Facial recognition systems have “clear potential for misuse” and are often inaccurate when identifying black people and other racial minorities, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat, said during the hearing. The use of facial recognition technology in criminal prosecutions raises “constitutional concerns” about fairness and due process, she added.
As it looks at the use of facial recognition by police, Congress needs to ask “if the risks of depriving someone of their liberty unjustly are too great,” Jackson Lee said.
In June, a group of seven Democratic and one independent lawmaker reintroduced the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, which would prohibit the use of facial recognition technology by federal agencies, with only Congress able to lift the ban. The bill would also ban the use of other biometric technologies, such as voice recognition. An earlier version of the bill, introduced in 2020, failed to advance in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The Security Industry Association, a trade group, immediately opposed the bill. Facial recognition systems have, among other things, been used to identify people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and to reunite victims of human trafficking with their families. Congress should pass “balanced” legislation that ensures the technology is used ethically and responsibly.
One witness at the House hearing told lawmakers he was falsely arrested in early 2020 by Detroit police after “blurry” surveillance footage showed another black man shoplifting a watch. Robert Williams, a logistics planner in the automotive industry, spent nearly 30 hours in custody before he was released, he said.
Facial recognition can be wildly inaccurate when attempting to identify black and Asian people, he said.
“Why is law enforcement even allowed to use such technology when it obviously doesn’t work?” he added. “I get angry when I hear companies, politicians, and police talk about how this technology isn’t dangerous or flawed or say that they only use it as an investigative tool. If any of that was true, I wouldn’t have been arrested.”
Still, some law enforcement and technology advocates say banning facial recognition isn’t the right move. In most cases, facial recognition is combined with other law enforcement techniques to investigate crimes, said Cedric Alexander, former public safety director in DeKalb County, Georgia.
“Facial recognition technology has been useful in law enforcement and, I believe, will continue to develop technically and therefore become even more useful,” he told lawmakers. “Blanket bans on [facial recognition] in policing are unwarranted and deny to police agencies a tool that is an important aid to public safety.”
In some cases, facial recognition has been misused with police agencies sometimes using altered photos, forensic artist sketches, and celebrity pictures for facial recognition searches.
Alexander called for an “intelligent” policy governing facial recognition, including requirements for transparency about the use of the technology. For example, most law enforcement agencies don’t now disclose how they use facial recognition or conduct audits to ensure it’s not being misused, he said.
“Secrecy in matters of constitutional rights, human rights, and civil rights provokes fear and suspicion,” Alexander added.
But improving the accuracy of the technology won’t solve all the problems, Williams suggested.
“Even if this technology does become accurate, at the expense of people like me, I don’t want my daughters’ faces to be part of some government database,” he said. “I don’t want cops showing up at their door because they were recorded at a protest the government didn’t like. I don’t want them to have a police record for something they didn’t do — like I now do.”
