Gadsden OKs in-house use of facial recognition technology for police
The city of Gadsden, Alabama has approved its police department's use of facial recognition technology for in-house investigations. The decision brings the city into a growing number of local law enforcement agencies adopting the biometric tool.
Why this matters: When a small city police department gets facial recognition, it rarely makes national news. That is part of the problem. These tools are spreading department by department, with little public debate and no consistent rules about when officers can use them, how accurate they need to be, or what happens to people wrongly matched. Facial recognition misidentifies people of color at much higher rates. A wrong match by a local police department can still get someone arrested. Gadsden residents now live in a city where their face can be run through a database. Most of them probably do not know it yet.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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