Less than two months ago, both the Milwaukee Police and Milwaukee County Sheriff were either using or exploring facial recognition technology to help with investigations. But they’ve both since stopped.
To find out what role community members played in that decision, WUWM reporters Eddie Morales and Jimmy Gutierrez traced the recent history of this fight.
Commissioners question police
Over the past year, the City of Milwaukee has wrestled with if, and how, it should use facial recognition technology (FRT). With local law enforcement decidedly pro-FRT and many community members opposed to it, a back-and-forth played out online, in the streets and in board meetings inside City Hall.
Law enforcement agencies use FRT to assist in investigations. The technology uses surveillance footage and compares it to a database of photos, like mugshots, to identify suspects. Some of the controversy stems from agencies that use the technology without guardrails.
At a Feb. 5 Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission meeting, community organizers and FRT opponents packed the room inside City Hall for what would be a 5-hour meeting.
At the time, the public knew MPD had used FRT in just a limited number of cases. But knowledge of the department’s ongoing FRT use emerged when Commissioner Krissie Fung started to question police leadership.
“Just to clarify, is the practice still continuing?” Fung asked MPD Inspector Paul Lough.
“As needed, right now we are using [FRT],” Lough responded.
Not only had MPD been using or borrowing FRT in investigations, it had also done so without any internal procedures. It was a revelation for meeting attendees, including Commissioner Bree Spencer.
“I did not know prior to just now that you guys were still using/borrowing FRT,” Spencer said at the meeting. “I don’t think that’s acceptable.”
Spencer then shared her stance against MPD’s FRT use, saying her “trust is diminished.”
“Even if FRT was the best thing ever — which it’s not — if the community was coming with this energy to tell me they didn’t want this, then that’s it for me."
The next day, MPD released the following statement:
"After hearing from the community and the Fire and Police Commission last evening, the Milwaukee Police Department will voluntarily issue a moratorium on the use of any and all facial recognition technology (FRT) use for the Department. We understand the public concern, particularly in light of national circumstances. Despite our belief that this is useful technology to assist in generating leads for apprehending violent criminals, we recognize that the public trust is far more valuable. Therefore, effective immediately, Chief Norman will issue a department directive banning the use of facial recognition for all members. In addition, MPD will not proceed with the acquisition of any facial recognition technology at this time."
Concerns over wrongful arrests
Amanda Merkwae is the advocacy director at the ACLU of Wisconsin. She’s followed the fallout of FRT in other cities for years.
“Folks were faced with wrongful arrests and sometimes incarcerated for a period of time because of a false facial recognition hit,” says Merkwae.
Merkwae referenced FRT use in Detroit, where there have been a number of wrongful arrests, costing the city in litigation and bad press. Robert Williams was one of the first cases. He spent 30 hours in jail for a false match. Police arrested Porscha Woodruff at her home as she was getting her daughters ready for school. Woodruff was also eight months pregnant at the time.
Merkwae said a common problem with this technology is it’s not good at its job — identifying people. A major concern from FRT critics is that the technology exhibits a profound racial bias.
“It wasn’t a coincidence that almost every single one of the known false matches from FRT that led to wrongful arrests were of Black people,” said Merkwae.
While all this was going on in Detroit, things seemed quiet in Milwaukee. That was until Merkwae got a call from a colleague who sent her a Wisconsin Court of Appeals case in 2024. It mentioned that investigators had used FRT.
Merkwae and the ACLU became curious. Then, at a Fire and Police Commission meeting in April 2025, MPD expressed desire to sign a contract with tech company Biometrica to use its FRT software in exchange for 2.5 million booking photos.
“In this pitch, MPD admitted that they had been using FRT indirectly by sending requests to other law enforcement agencies for, I think the quote from that meeting was, two to three years,” Merkwae said.
In May 2025, 11 alders sent a letter to Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman opposing FRT. That same month, MPD shared a presentation on FRT to Equal Rights Commission members, who later voted unanimously against placing FRT in the hands of local police.
Last November, the ACLU learned that MPD had used FRT from neighboring jurisdictions in 18 investigations.
How did the community win the fight against FRT?
A major factor for the community’s success in opposing FRT is the persistence of local social justice groups, concerned citizens and public commenters who voiced concerns at meetings. Emilio De Torre is the executive director of the Milwaukee Turners — the oldest civic group in the city. He said that Turners started having conversations about FRT and its potential issues almost five years ago.
“In early 2024, we began to pay more attention to the Fire and Police Commission and we formalized our program to kind of analyze what power the Fire and Police Commission had from a supervisory point of view over the Milwaukee Police Department, the fire department post-Act 12,” De Torre says.
Act 12 was a revenue sharing agreement the city entered with the state that, among other things, took away the Fire and Police Commission's power over MPD policies. The commission has been nationally recognized for community control and input. After Act 12, the commission entered a new era with less power, trying to define its role.
De Torre says he has an idea of why so many people came together over the issue of facial recognition technology, and why they’ve been showing up meeting after meeting for the past year. He called it a "cross-pollination" of concern.
“Because Milwaukee is a segregated city, and people have this ideological and sometimes cultural ethnic segregation, they’re aligning over issues of being righteously angry that they’re being surveilled and that there’s this presumption of guilt,” says De Torre.
De Torre is also concerned with how data from FRT and license plate reader technology like Flock Safety is being shared — not just among local jurisdictions, but with federal agencies.
“I believe that the intention of the surveillance equipment is right there in its name,” he says. “It’s Flock. They’re implying we’re sheep and we need to be shepherded. That is anathema to what the identity of what an American should be.”
Milwaukee County Sheriff backtracks on FRT
The Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office had also been exploring the use of FRT, specifically with Biometrica.
Mike Carriere is a professor at MSOE and volunteer on the Milwaukee Sheriff’s Community Advisory Board. In its February board meeting, Sheriff Denita Ball shared that she signed an exploratory agreement with Biometrica. Carriere heard this and had questions.
“What had the timeline up to that February meeting actually been like?” Carriere said in an interview. “Who was notified of the decision to enter that letter of intent? And who had to be? Because I’m not sure exactly how this works.”
Carriere says it didn’t sound like the sheriff was trying to be sneaky about this letter. But regardless, the sheriff's office later announced that it would not move forward with its relationship with Biometrica.
We asked Carriere how he read that decision, and if that had anything to do with how the community organized against MPD using the tech.
“That’s a really good question because I’m not entirely sure,” he said. “We haven’t had a meeting since that February announcement that this letter of intent had been signed. The next meeting is on the books for March. What’s happened in between has been, for me, is kind of a mystery.”
The board’s March meeting was canceled, so Carriere won’t know more about the sheriff’s position until the April meeting. Carriere said MPD’s decision to halt FRT use might have had some impact on the sheriff’s backtracking.
MPD said it sees FRT as a “useful tool for investigations.” Even with the public pressure, Chief Norman essentially said at the February FPC meeting that it’s almost inevitable it’ll become part of their toolkit. That’s why Merkwae, De Torre, and groups against FRT use like Milwaukee Alliance, Voces de la Frontera, BLOC, Milwaukee for Palestine and more are planning to keep a watchful eye.
Some FPC members said that when the public shows up and packs a room like it did earlier this year, it absolutely changes the power dynamics. Even though the FPC has lost a lot of its power, and the sheriff’s advisory board is there to simply advise, people showing up and speaking out does make a difference.
In its February statement, MPD said it will continue to work with the FPC, Common Council, Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson and the community to craft a formal policy, but will not utilize facial recognition until that process is complete.
The MPD and the Milwaukee County Sheriff's Office said there have been no changes to their use of FRT since both departments' decisions in February.
Editor's note: Emilio De Torre is a member of WUWM’s Community Advisory Board. Editorial decisions are independent of that board.
