NYPD Commissioner O’Neill's op-ed for @PrivacyProject side-steps or ignores many of the problems with facial recognition. Let’s be clear about things: nytimes.com/2019/06/09/opi…
NYPD says their analyses don’t look at race, gender, or ethnicity. But that isn’t the problem. Multiple tests of facial recognition systems show they can't reliably identify women & people with darker skin tones. 1 in 2 New Yorkers are women, & over 50% of NYC is Black or Latinx.
That means facial recognition doesn't reliably work on the average New Yorker even under the best circumstances. And the truth is, NYPD’s use of this technology falls way short of that…
Commissioner O'Neill says NYPD doesn't run police sketches through facial recognition because they "would be of no value." We agree. But using photo editing software to create digital collages is virtually the same thing.
Cutting out a photo of a person’s lips and pasting them on top of someone else’s face is asking facial recognition systems to interpret art projects. Equally useless and unaddressed in the op-ed: using celebrity photos of Woody Harrelson or J.R. Smith to find suspects.
Commissioner O'Neill doesn't discuss what kind of confidence thresholds are acceptable for the NYPD. Just because the system returns its best guess doesn't mean the potential match is reliable.
NYPD says their system only analyzes pictures against its database of arrest photos. But biased policing programs like stop-and-frisk make it likely that most of the faces in this database will be black and brown. The result? A feedback loop of over-policing communities of color.
We're laying the groundwork for an unaccountable digital stop & frisk program. In 2018, facial recognition led to 998 arrests. What racial groups are most impacted? Is it used to enforce low-level crimes like turnstile jumping?How often were people stopped & questioned?
One thing we can agree on: the public should know how NYPD uses facial recognition and what safeguards it has in place.
But that information shouldn't be in a NYT op-ed responding to public criticism, it should be made available to the public and @NYCCouncil.
The NYPD should make common-sense transparency disclosures about every surveillance tool it uses. Police around the country already do this, it's time for NYC to catch up and pass the #POSTAct.
Learn more about #POSTAct here: brennancenter.org/analysis/publi…
And check out this great new resource from @techworkerscony: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_su…
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