Resources

The proliferation in local police departments’ use of surveillance technology, which in most places has occurred without any community input or control, presents significant threats to civil rights and civil liberties that disproportionately impact communities of color and low-income communities. The nationwide “Community Control Over Police Surveillance” effort is looking to change that through legislation mandating that local communities are given a meaningful opportunity to review and participate in all decisions about if and how surveillance technologies are acquired and used locally.

Piecing together the responses to over 100 Freedom of Information Act requests and dozens of interviews, researchers found that more than half of American adults were enrolled in a face recognition network searchable by law enforcement. Across the country, state and local police departments are building their own face recognition systems, many of them more advanced than the FBI’s. We know very little about these systems. We don’t know how they impact privacy and civil liberties. We don’t know how they address accuracy problems. And we don’t know how any of these systems—local, state, or federal—affect racial and ethnic minorities.

A report that details the various ways police may use facial recognition methods to pursue suspects. There are no rules when it comes to what images police can submit to face recognition algorithms to generate investigative leads. As a consequence, agencies across the country can—and do—submit all manner of “probe photos,” photos of unknown individuals submitted for search against a police or driver license database. These images may be low-quality surveillance camera stills, social media photos with filters, and scanned photo album pictures. Records from police departments show they may also include computer-generated facial features, or composite or artist sketches.

This report details the different, and potentially dangerous, ways that facial surveillance and recognition technology are currently being used and how they could be used in the future. Thanks to face recognition technology, authorities are able to conduct biometric surveillance—pick you out from a crowd, identify you, trace your movements across a city with the network of cameras capturing your face—all completely in secret. No longer is video surveillance limited to recording what happens; it may now identify who is where, doing what, at any point in time.

A report that looks at differences in attitudes toward police by race and ethnicity in the United States. It also looks at potential influences on these attitudes, such as perceived bias, anxiety about crime, perceived competence of police, cases of police misconduct, and more. The report concludes with potential policies for policing reform.