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1 Civil Rights Concerns regarding Law Enforcement Use of Face Recognition Technology 1 (2021)

handle is hein.brennan/bccvrtscr0001 and id is 1 raw text is: OPEN NEW TcL~drh O TECHNOLOGY A TheLeadership . INSTITUTE AMERICA Conference EduationFce June 3, 2021 Civil Rights Concerns Regarding Law Enforcement Use of Face Recognition Technology Across the country, local, state, and federal law enforcement and immigration agencies use face recognition systems to identify, track, and target individuals. More than half of all U.S. adults are already in face recognition databases used for criminal investigations.' This technology dramatically expands law enforcement's power and poses severe threats to everyone's safety, wellbeing, and freedoms of expression and association-but especially for Black and Brown communities, Muslim communities, immigrant communities, Indigenous communities, and other people historically and currently marginalized and targeted by policing. Much of the public debate has focused on the alarming inaccuracy of face recognition systems, particularly on women and people with darker skin.2 In at least three cases that are publicly known, police have relied on erroneous face recognition identifications to make wrongful arrests of Black men, underscoring the dangerous nature of this technology in the hands of law enforcement.3 But improvements in the technology's accuracy will not address the fundamental problem: face recognition expands the scope and power of law enforcement, an institution that has a long and documented history of racial discrimination and racial violence that continues to this day. In the context of policing, face recognition is always dangerous-no matter its accuracy. Throughout our nation's history, law enforcement has used surveillance to silence dissent and to maintain white supremacy, from slave patrols4 to the FBI's COINTELPRO program. Face recognition and other modern surveillance technologies promise to continue a history that has shown itself to be incompatible with the freedoms and rights of Black and Brown communities. 1 Clare Garvie, Alvaro Bedoya, and Jonathan Frankle, The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America, Geo. L. Ctr. on Privacy & Tech. 42 (Oct. 18, 2016), available athtt2s:/Iwwwoerietuallineu .orol. 2 Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification (2018), available at htto://proceedin s.mlr press/v$1/buolamwinil8a/buolamwini18a.odf; Patrick Grother, Mei Ngan, Kayee Hanaoka, Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) Part 3: Demographic Effects, NISTIR 8280, Nat'l Inst. of Standards and Technology (December 2019), available at https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2019/NIST.IR.8280.pdf. 3 Kashmir Hill, Another Arrest, and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match, N.Y. Times (Dec. 29, 2020), htgs://www. nytimes. com/2020/1 2/29/tech nologv/facial-recog nition-misidentif-jai I.htm. 4 Hassett-Walker, Connie, The Racist Roots of American Policing: From Slave Patrols to Traffic Stops, The Conversation (June 2, 2020), available at https://theconversation c 12816. 1

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