Resources

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.

Obtained from thousands of state agencies, prosecutors, police departments and sheriffs, the records detail at least 200,000 incidents of alleged misconduct, much of it previously unreported. The records obtained include more than 110,000 internal affairs investigations by hundreds of individual departments and more than 30,000 officers who were decertified by 44 state oversight agencies.

This report makes recommendations to the Workgroup on the Prevention of Profiling by Law Enforcement (WPPLE) in four core areas of police reform: Data Collection, Analysis and Reporting; Accountability Mechanisms, Training, and Procedural Justice.

A collection of reports that serve as scorecards for county policing and prosecution practices for multiple states. Reports include policy solutions and tools for communities to challenge local leaders to adopt proven reform strategies.

This report looks at the increasing use of predictive policing systems that are built on data produced during documented periods of flawed, racially biased, and sometimes unlawful practices and policies. Using three case study examples, it examines the negative impact of these systems based on “dirty data.”

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.

Part of a report on partisan divides, this report looks at differences in attitudes towards police based on political party and broken down by race and age.

Raheem is an independent service for reporting police conduct in the United States.