California is poised to ban the use of facial recognition technology in police body cameras for three years after votes by the state legislature this week.
AB 1215 passed the state Senate 22-15 on Wednesday and the state Assembly 47-21 on Thursday. It has been sent to Gov. Gavin Newsom for signing.
Assemblymember Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, introduced the bill, citing inaccurate identification and apparent racial biases in the current state of the technology.
The American Civil Liberties Union ran every California legislature member through a mugshot database, which falsely identified 26 lawmakers, including Ting.
Ting said that more than half of the people falsely identified were members of racial minorities.
“Without my bill, facial recognition technology essentially turns body cameras into a 24-hour surveillance tool, giving law enforcement the ability to track our every movement,” Ting said in a statement.
“Let’s not become a police state and keep body cameras as they were originally intended — to provide police accountability and transparency,” he added.
The statewide ban on use in body cameras follows citywide bans of facial recognition technology passed this year in Oakland and San Francisco.
Those go a step beyond Ting’s bill and ban any use of the technology by city government.
Ting’s bill would only ban its use in body cameras, so other uses of the technology, such as a mugshot database operated by the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office and accessible to law enforcement agencies through the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, would remain available.
It’s not likely that most body cameras would use facial recognition technology anytime soon. Axon, the largest manufacturer of police body cameras, decided in June not to implement facial recognition software in its products, citing flaws in the current state of the technology.
However, the company left the door open to equipping body cameras with facial recognition in the future.
10 comments
It’s a tool folks! It generates leads. That’s all! Police don’t make arrests based solely on facial recognition hits! But it can LEAD TO apprehending killers, rapists and others that feed of our citizens! Once again, our California legislators bind the hands of law enforcement! Amazing!
Facial Recognition, unfortunately, is a bit of wild west show on how it is used now by law enforcement and the tech itself is not all that reliable.
A simple example – in 2019 a test using Amazon’s software, “Rekognition,” it was found that searching a database of 25,000 publicly available arrest photos against every member of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, the system incorrectly identified 28 as criminals.
If you were a little person and you were identified you could be arrested, held, either get a public defender (in which case you are in real trouble) or spend thousands on a private lawyer – and then the police will show up in uniform, with their “experts” and will explain to a jury that has zero understanding of the technology that of course, the system is reliable and that it was some magically high percentage of accuracy.
Rob,
I respect your opinion. I don’t disagree that studies have proven that it’s not close to being 100% reliable. That’s why the courts are very restrictive on it. But I can tell you that, where they’re used, arrests are not made on facial recognition alone. In fact, I don’t know of a single law enforcement agency that would arrest a person based solely on this technique. What it provides is a lead. That’s it.
Conservatives and libertarians should be praising this decision.
Do you mean the groups that have been yelling for decades of Big Government, Government Overreach, Expansion of Government Powers, Big Technology, etc.?
Of course not – they 100% trust police because police have nothing do with the government or expanding powers…
And of course, they would totally trust the algorithms that those Big Tech companies are creating that used in facial recognition technology – because of course, an algorithm can’t be wrong …
“The American Civil Liberties Union ran every California legislature member through a mugshot database, which falsely identified 26 lawmakers …”
Considering some of legislation passed by them in past decade or so,
facial recognition technology might not be so far off.
And yet the geniuses in Sacramento have signed laws that require any new model pistol have micro stamping technology in order to be sold in the state. Despite fully acknowledging that such technology isn’t feasible.
So, just so I am clear… There are people who believe that a mistaken ID, which only leads to investigation, would be better than identifying criminals? Exactly who’s side are Phil Ting and the rest of those idiots in Sacramento on?
Simply put. It is pending investigation. They take time.
A three year ban tells me that there are still too many kinks in the tech.
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