The Truth and Benefit of Using Facial Recognition in Law Enforcement

There are several, recent, ongoing efforts to prevent the use of facial recognition in law enforcement. Employee protests at Google and Microsoft and now Amazon are demanding that CEO Jeff Bezos, stop selling the company’s Rekognition facial recognition software to law enforcement. Also, a coalition of civil rights groups, including the ACLU, in a letter published Tuesday, followed in asking Amazon to stop selling the program to law enforcement because it ”poses a grave threat to customers and communities across the country.” — mostly citing privacy as the main concern. And WaPo even went to the extent claiming that Amazon is making “a fistful of dollars” selling the their AWS Rekognition service, only to contradict themselves in the article later by mentioning that customers pay only “ $6 and $12 a month for the service” — super reasonable.

Although I think that privacy as we know it is DEAD, yet I do respect other people’s need for privacy, I also think people’s safety and the public’s safety is just as important. If there is a use of facial recognition and video analytics that does not egregiously invade people’s privacy — law enforcement should deploy it TODAY to help save lives. Our kids are using more technology on a daily basis that our law enforcement officers are afforded to use, which creates a disadvantages. Here are 3 truths and benefits of facial recognition and video analytics for public safety use:

• No Bias, No Profiling, No Discrimination — Years ago, I was on Fox News, interviewed as a surveillance expert, and although they shared the topics of the segment in advance, they sprung an unexpected topic, “What about privacy?”. My assertion was that when facial recognition and video analytics are deployed properly, it only grabs a visual fingerprint that can be compared against a database of bad guys. The software just analyzes the data and looks for “bad guy” patterns. The software has no personal bias against the suspect it is analyzing. The software does not racially profile, its simply compares data. And the software only discriminates against bad behavior it recognizes in its analyzes. Therefore from this respect, software is an often better candidate to analyze images and video than humans.
• It Works. Bad Guys are Found Faster — In 2017, Chris Adzima, a Senior Information Systems Analyst for the Washington County Sheriff’s Office published a blog post on how he implemented Amazon’s Rekognition service to identify persons of interest quickly. He fed about 300,000 images from the county’s mug shot database into Amazon’s system.
  Within a week of going live, the system was used to identify and arrest a suspect who stole more than $5,000 from local stores with no leads before the system identified him.

In law enforcement, it is extremely important to identify persons of interest quickly. In most cases, this is accomplished by showing a picture of the person to multiple law enforcement officers in hopes that someone knows the person. In Washington County, Oregon, there are nearly 20,000 different bookings (when a person is processed into the jail) every year. As time passes, officers’ memories of individual bookings fade. Also, in most cases, investigations move very quickly. Waiting for an officer to come on duty to identify a picture might mean missing the opportunity to solve the case.

• More Efficient Policing, More Time on Streets — Studies show that having more officers on the street can reduce crime. Law enforcement officers, spend a LOT of time writing incident reports, arrest reports and bookings. Having a more efficient system that can streamline identification and processing of suspects, allow those officers to get back out on the street faster, to help reduce crime.

In summary, we should consider a responsible way to put modern technologies into the hands of our law enforcement to proactively protect the public and keep us safe.