For law enforcement, facial recognition technology, or FRT, can be a powerful tool that can lead to faster arrests. But critics of facial recognition are concerned about its accuracy and potential misuse. As Milwaukee Police and the Milwaukee County Sheriff's Office explore adopting the technology, some are questioning it.
Phil Simmert is the commander of the fusion division at the Milwaukee Police Department. At a Milwaukee Equal Rights Commission meeting last month, he explains why MPD wants to contract with a company called Biometrica.
"Once [data] goes into their system and gets transferred it doesn’t get shared," Simmert says. "We intentionally chose this company because there are facial recognition companies that literally will take faces from an iPhone and they will purchase public data. We were intentional that we don’t want to be in that business. The only data that we are giving them are jail records."
In exchange for two Biometrica licenses, MPD would provide the company jail records including 2.5 million booking photos. That raises questions for Amanda Merkwae, the Advocacy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin. Merkwae says she’s curious about how Biometrica profits off of jail data. One of the company’s products, called eMotive, serves as a database for employers to receive real-time alerts if one of their employees is arrested.
Biometrica bills itself as a data organization rather than a biometrics provider. The company says it uses a third-party facial recognition service to match images.
"Any statement from the company that I’ve read raised more questions for me," Merkwae says. "Whose third-party algorithm is it and would that be disclosed if someone is in a case and wants to challenge the accuracy? Who are we supposed to cross examine about the accuracy of that?"
Merkwae and community critics of FRT are also concerned about the accuracy of the software. While the technology has led to successful arrests, it has also led to wrongful ones across the country. Studies have shown that people of color and other marginalized communities are disproportionately misidentified up to 100 times more than white men. That’s why MPD says facial recognition matches are only intended as a starting point to identify leads.
MPD’s Major Crimes Division Chief, David Anderson, gave an example at the commission meeting. He recounts how MPD officers, using a neighboring jurisdiction’s FRT, correctly identified a robbery suspect, even though the suspect was not the most likely match using facial recognition.
"Our detectives did work on all those individuals and were able to find that the individual it ended up being was on probation parole," says Anderson. "The probation parole agent, the still was shown and they identified him as a suspect."
MPD Chief of Staff Heather Hough says measures would be written into the department’s standard procedures to avoid wrongful arrests.
"It is not enough for probable cause or even reasonable suspicion to stop and ask somebody questions if they’re a potential match on facial recognition," she says.
But for the ACLU’s Merkwae, policies aren’t enough to mitigate misuse.
"Even in jurisdictions where there is a policy in place governing how FRT is used there are still significant problems with police omitting material information about FRT use in criminal cases," says Merkwae. "So, they don’t include or mention that FRT is used in search or arrest warrant applications to judges or they kind of downplay the unreliability of that technology."
After hearing concerns from the community, the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution for the Sheriff’s Office to create a plan with community stakeholders to regulate facial recognition technology. A recommendation must be submitted to the board before May next year.
