Name: Lawmaker looks to rein in law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology
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Lawmaker looks to rein in law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology

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AdvertisementBy The Virginian-PilotJan 16, 2021 at 11:11 amA state lawmaker has introduced legislation that would require local civilian leaders to give police departments approval before they could use facial recognition technology.Del. Lashrecse Aird, D-Petersburg, this week filed House Bill 2031, which would ban most law enforcement agencies from using such technology unless city or town leaders pass an ordinance authorizing its use. In the case of campus police departments, a governing board would have to approve it. The Virginia State Police would still be able to use facial recognition if it wanted to, but an agency spokeswoman has said it doesn’t and has no plans to do so.AdvertisementAird said the bill was the result of The Virginian-Pilot’s investigation into how the Norfolk Police Department had been using Clearview AI, a controversial facial recognition technology, without the knowledge of the mayor and most City Council members.“(That) really struck me as unacceptable,” the delegate said.AdvertisementIn November 2019, Norfolk gang detectives signed up to try Clearview AI’s app. Over the next three months, Norfolk police used Clearview in about 20 investigations, and it helped them make nine arrests, Norfolk Police Chief Larry Boone said.The Norfolk Police Department was one of more than 600 law enforcement agencies across the U.S. that, without public scrutiny, started using Clearview between Jan. 1, 2019, and January 2020, according to a New York Times investigation. In some cases, top brass in those departments didn’t know their officers were using Clearview because officers were able to sign up and start using the app with little more difficulty than downloading another program, such as Facebook or Twitter.It’s that possibility of under-the-radar use that Aird wants to quash. Making police ask elected leaders for permission to try facial recognition will force transparency and allow the public a chance to have a say in how they’re being policed. Right now, law enforcement can use it without any notification.“(It’s) a recipe for disaster,” Aird said.In the three months they used Clearview, the Norfolk detectives uploaded photos of unknown people and suspects to the app, which then spit out public photos of those people, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — powered by a database of more than 3 billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever built by the United States government or Silicon Valley heavyweights, according to The Times story.The technology is complicated, but the idea is simple: Plug in a photo of a person you want to identify, and the app spits out any photo of that person that’s ever been publicly uploaded to the Internet. Clearview has marketed their app as a tool that lets investigators “solve crimes instantly and save lives” with a computer program that’s “like Google Search for faces.”The Norfolk detectives were so impressed with how the technology identified unknown suspects and helped solve crimes that they pushed the top brass to shell out thousands of dollars a year to make facial recognition one of their permanent crime fighting tools.But Boone killed that effort and ordered everyone in the department to stop using the technology. In an interview with The Pilot, the police chief said the public needed to know and talk about such a hot-button issue before police permanently added it to its investigative repertoire.Advertisement“That can be perceived to be so intrusive — Big Brother is watching,” Boone said in the June interview. “Our current society isn’t quite ready for that.”Aird agrees. She linked the issue to police reform and the civil unrest that has erupted since the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer jammed his knee into Floyd’s neck for some eight minutes as Floyd begged him to get off.Before using more powerful tools like facial recognition, law enforcement agencies need to figure out how to use the ones they already have — arresting people, writing citations, the use of force — without disproportionately affecting people of color, Aird said last year. If they don’t, officers who start using new technology are just going to fall into grooves well worn by systemic racism, implicit bias, and in some cases, outright bigotry — but with something more powerful and little understood.“I think that puts more lives at risk. I think it allows for greater discrimination and bias,” she said.Norfolk — with more than 42% of its 244,000 residents being Black and more than half being people of color — is one of the cities where she’s most worried about police using programs like Clearview, given that facial recognition has historically and consistently misidentified non-white people.Last year, Aird said she felt a sense of urgency to provide top-down rules for cities and towns so they can’t fill the vacuum in a “use-now-apologize-later” approach.Advertisement“We need these guardrails as soon as possible,” she said at the time. “By the time it becomes a kitchen table conversation, it will be too late to add (them).”DailyStart your morning in-the-know with the day's top stories. &gt; On Thursday, Aird said she thought about trying to ban law enforcement from using facial recognition technology, because multiple national studies have shown it disproportionately misidentifies people of color. But she committed to not doing so until the issue could be studied by the General Assembly’s Joint Commission on Technology and Science, a process that has been stymied by the pandemic. So she’s going for what she called a “half measure” until that can happen.Mayor Kenny Alexander last year said he didn’t know the police department had used Clearview until The Pilot told him in early April, and so he was not involved in the decision to use it. But, the mayor added, he thinks the police chief made the right call to end the program after the three-month trial.“We found that it was really problematic,” he said at the time. “This is not just a crime fighting tool apparatus. This has the potential of doing much, much more.”Because of that potential, Alexander said it would have been “warranted and appreciated” for police and city officials to present the pros and cons to the City Council before using it. But the mayor stopped short of saying they should have taken that step.For the mayor, many of the problems with Clearview are unanswered: How accurate is the program? How has the company secured its database? What happens to the photos submitted by Norfolk police into Clearview’s system? Is Clearview using those in other ways? How so? Are the photos deleted after a certain period of time?AdvertisementState lawmakers are the best people to answer those questions, Alexander said last year, adding that he’s glad delegates like Aird are seeking answers. The state legislature needs to take the lead by getting input from tech experts, law enforcement officials, privacy rights groups and others, he said. Then they can transform those answers into legislation that will determine if and how law enforcement can use facial recognition.Jonathan Edwards, 757-739-7180, Advertisement

AdvertisementBy The Virginian-PilotJan 16, 2021 at 11:11 amA state lawmaker has introduced legislation that would require local civilian leaders to give police departments approval before they could use facial recognition technology.Del. Lashrecse Aird, D-Petersburg, this week filed House Bill 2031, which would ban most law enforcement agencies from using such technology unless city or town leaders pass an ordinance authorizing its use. In the case of campus police departments, a governing board would have to approve it. The Virginia State Police would still be able to use facial...

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@washingtonpost  reporter. Ex- @virginianpilot .  @LivingstonAward  finalist. Waging an "inquisition." he/him jonathan.edwards@washpost.com

Lawmaker looks to rein in law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology

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