Police Say They Can Use Facial Recognition, Despite Bans
Mere hours after supporters of former president Donald Trump forced their way into the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, sleuths, both amateur and professional, took up the task of combing through the voluminous videos and photos on social media to identify rioters. Facial recognition technology—long reviled by police reform advocates as inaccurate and racially biased—was suddenly everywhere.
A college student in Washington, D.C., used facial recognition to extract faces from videos on social media. The Washington Post used facial recognition to count the number of individual faces at the Capitol Building attack, and a researcher from Citizen Lab used it to identify people involved in the riots. And when the FBI posted photos of rioters, looking for help with identification, the Miami Police Department assigned two detectives to scan faces into the department’s Clearview facial recognition app.
The episode was a reminder that facial recognition software is now ubiquitous in the private and public sectors—a fact that often gets overlooked as cities pass high-profile laws that purport to ban law enforcement from using the technology. The Markup examined 17 bans passed in the past couple of years, speaking with local officials and reading through official documents. In six of those cities, officials either told The Markup or otherwise publicly stated that loopholes in the bans effectively allow police to access information garnered through facial recognition.
The bans in Pittsburgh; Boston; Alameda, Calif.; Madison, Wis.; Northampton, Mass.; and Easthampton, Mass., all have language in their regulations that may allow local police to continue using facial recognition through state and federal agencies or the private sector.
