As a growing list of American cities like Portland, San Francisco and New Orleans protect residents from facial recognition, New York City continues to lag behind. For months, calls have been growing to “ban the scan” and outlaw facial recognition in New York. The campaign that launched in January with support from organizations across the world accelerated in February with more than 7,000 comments to the NYPD and lawmakers to end facial recognition. Now, the call to action has taken on a new target, Speaker Corey Johnson, who has the power to determine if facial recognition will continue in New York.
With one photo, the NYPD could conceivably track where you’re going and what you’re doing — whether it is the mosque you attend, the reproductive health-care facility where you’re seeking care, or the organizing meeting you’re leading. The NYPD used facial recognition more than 22,000 times in the last three years alone. Facial recognition technology is biased, broken and gives the police and other law enforcement agencies like ICE yet another tool to criminalize Black, Brown, Indigenous, transgender and immigrant communities. Surveillance and policing have always been a form of social control, and facial recognition is no different: It strengthens an anti-Black criminal legal system that monitors and incarcerates.
In past months, rather than taking up the widespread call to action, Johnson wasted precious time following Gov. Cuomo’s mandate to “reimagine policing.” We don’t need to reimagine tools like facial recognition that exacerbate racist policing, we need to ban them. With Johnson now hoping to soon become city controller, the facial recognition debate offers one last test of whether the self-proclaimed progressive has the track record to support that label.
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and other lawmakers have been trying to introduce a facial recognition ban for months, but they are stuck. Because of a quirk with City Council process, no matter how many councilmembers support the measure, it will never see the light of day, unless Johnson acts.
Facial recognition is a form of surveillance that is often hidden, and our faces are a form of identification that follow us for our entire lives. The technology is often paired with other tracking tools that make its use even worse. Facial recognition fuels the NYPD’s so-called gang database — a secretive list that targets Black and Brown New Yorkers. The database profiles people based on their social media posts and affiliations, criminalizing them for what they wear, who they know and where they live. Reports have shown that the NYPD has consistently misused the technology too, altering images captured to attempt to construct matches in the database.
The technology on its own is also deeply biased. A 2018 study found that facial recognition algorithms are overwhelmingly trained by data sets with photos of white male individuals. The algorithms are more error-prone for dark-skinned individuals, particularly dark-skinned women. In 2019, federal officials found that Black and Asian people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men. Alarmingly, the technology is likely to misidentify Indigenous and transgender people too. Facial recognition automates and amplifies the discrimination against Black, Brown, Indigenous, transgender and immigrant communities that has defined New York City’s policing for as long as our city has had police.
Private companies, like Clearview AI, are facilitating access to facial recognition technology for police departments across the country, including in New York City. The NYPD used the controversial platform in 2018 and 2019, though this since appear to have discontinued the practice. In that time, the department ran more than 11,000 unofficial facial recognition searches using Clearview’s database which the company built by exploiting billions of photos from the public. Recent reports exposed that about 50 NYPD officers had access to an account and many of them were querying the database on their personal devices. The Staten Island district attorney’s office recently signed a contract with Clearview AI, but it’s unclear if the contract is still active. Clearview AI, in addition to its role in aggressively marketing the broken technology, has troubling ties to white supremacists and contracts with ICE too.
If New York City is serious about being a sanctuary city, ending these partnerships is one of many steps it can take to ensure the safety of our immigrant communities.
Facial recognition cannot be reformed. The technology doesn’t work and is only used to further the NYPD’s mission to criminalize our communities. It’s past time for Johnson to introduce a bill to ban facial recognition and take a step towards defunding the police and its surveillance tools.
Cahn is the founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) and a fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and the Engelberg Center for Innovation Law & Policy at New York University School of Law. Panjwani is policy and advocacy director at S.T.O.P. and an inaugural Take Back Tech Fellow with Just Futures Law and Mijente.