The bill in the Legislature we were supporting, Assembly Bill 1215 co-sponsored by Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, prohibited police agencies “from installing, activating, or using any biometric surveillance system in connection with an officer camera or data collected by an officer camera.”
Among many other problems, the widespread use of facial recognition technology is yet another huge banana peel on the slippery slope toward a government surveillance state.
But, as we noted at the time, it’s also woefully inaccurate: “If Silicon Valley’s facial-recognition technology works so well, then how come 26 members of the California Legislature were recently wrongly ID’d as criminals when their photographs were compared to a mugshot database?”
Facial recognition is “the functional equivalent of requiring every person to show a personal photo identification card at all times in violation of recognized constitutional rights,” the bill’s backers — among them the ACLU — said, adding that the tech “allows people to be tracked without consent. It would also generate massive databases about law-abiding Californians, and may chill the exercise of free speech in public places.”
The bill passed — but its moratorium was just for three years, and is set to expire at the end of 2022. We very much support a replacement and enhancement of it, Senate Bill 1038, introduced by Sen. Steven Bradford, D- San Pedro, which “prohibits a law enforcement agency or law enforcement officer from installing, activating, or using any biometric surveillance system in connection with an officer camera or data collected by an officer camera,” and which extends the 2019 law indefinitely.
Facial recognition software is not only inaccurate but biased, generating up to 100 times more false positives for people of color. Other states that allow police to use the technology have seen multiple Black men subjected to wrongful arrests. Californians don’t want police using algorithms as the long, and wrong, arm of the law. Ban facial recognition by law enforcement.
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