As Detroit’s experience makes clear, there are steps that cities and their police departments can take to address concerns about privacy when it comes to facial recognition. However, governments and public safety agencies across the country should be aware that they need to respond to efforts to regulate the use of the technology. For example, the American Civil Liberties Union has been leading an effort for several years known as Community Control Over Police Surveillance, which seeks to pass laws that “ensure residents, through local city councils are empowered to decide if and how surveillance technologies are used, through a process that maximizes the public’s influence over those decisions.”
According to the ACLU, CCOPS laws have “already been secured in more than a dozen jurisdictions and local CCOPS efforts have sprouted up in more than thirty cities, ranging in size from a few thousand residents to more than 8 million.” City CIOs, police chiefs and other stakeholders need to be aware of these efforts and have plans in place to respond to civil liberties groups and concerned residents.
A March 2019 white paper created by the IJIS Institute and the International Association of Chiefs of Police notes that technologies like facial recognition systems are “essential to help police maintain order in the modern world” but that their success as an effective tool for law enforcement “are dependent upon ensuring that they are properly deployed and used.” The white paper concludes that law enforcement agencies “must work closely with the communities to explain their use, educate the public on the capabilities, and demonstrate how the use of facial recognition technology will benefit public safety.”
The white paper recommends that law enforcement “completely engage in public dialogue regarding purpose-driven facial recognition use, including how it operates, when and how images are taken and retained, and the situations in which it is used.” Additionally, police departments should be able to demonstrate appropriate uses of facial recognition to bolster confidence in them and avoid further mistrust.
The report also notes that public safety agencies should “widely publish facial recognition success stories to heighten overall awareness of its usefulness, especially those cases in which suspects are exonerated, or where facial recognition is used to protect vulnerable persons.”
Finally, best practice guides and models “should be immediately established and broadly adopted, to include training benchmarks, privacy standards, human examiner requirements, and antibias safeguards.”
If you work for a police department or city government that has successfully struck this balance, we would love to hear from you.
Police forces’ use of facial recognition technology is not an all-or-nothing equation. City governments and police departments can take steps to deploy the solutions — in concert with the will of the people they are supposed to serve.
This article is part of StateTech's CITizen blog series. Please join the discussion on Twitter by using the #StateLocalIT hashtag.