Tag: news

Detroit police wrongfully arrested Robert Williams and jailed him for 30 hours, largely on the basis of a facial recognition match to a grainy video of a jewelry store robber. When the police got around to questioning Williams, 18 hours after his arrest, they showed him two photos of the robber and asked if they were pictures of him. At that point, The New York Times reports, Williams held one of the images beside his face and said, “You think all black men look alike?” The officers recognized immediately that there was no resemblance to the suspect in the video. All the same, Williams was not released until hours later and only after paying a $1,000 personal bond.

After Williams held up the photo, one of the officers made a crucial mistake: He said “the computer must have gotten it wrong.” Police and prosecutors generally do not want to reveal that they have been using facial recognition technology to identify and arrest suspects. They especially don’t want defendants and their lawyers to question the accuracy of the technology in court later. They know that many studies have shown serious problems with the technology’s accuracy, particularly with respect to identifying individuals who belong to racial or ethnic minorities.

In Williams’ case, the Detroit police sent an image from the jewelry shop’s surveillance camera to the Michigan State Police. That agency, using DataWorks Plus facial recognition technology, ran the image through the state’s driver’s license database, which spit out Williams’ photo as a suspect. Williams’ photo was sent to the Detroit police as an “investigative lead report,” which stated it was “not a positive identification” and “is not probable cause for arrest.” Then, amazingly, the Detroit police showed a six-pack photo lineup containing Williams’ driver’s license photo to the shop’s security consultant. That consultant wasn’t there for the robbery; she’d only seen the same blurry surveillance video as the police. She nevertheless identified Williams as the culprit, and Williams was arrested.

Two weeks after his arrest, the prosecutor moved to dismiss the case—but “without prejudice,” which means that Williams could later be charged with the crime.

Williams eventually got in contact with the Michigan branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is now lodging a complaint on his behalf against the police department. The ACLU obtained a court order requiring the prosecutor’s office to turn over Williams’ complete file, including the warrant request and any body camera or dashboard camera footage of his arrest. As of this week, the prosecutors are still stonewalling and defying the court order by refusing to provide the required documents and/or claiming that they could not be located. The ACLU is asking for an absolute dismissal of the case, an apology, and the removal of Williams’ information from Detroit’s criminal databases.

After The New York Times‘ story about Williams appeared, the prosecutor’s office issued a statement noting that “this case should not have been issued based on the [Detroit Police Department] investigation, and for that we apologize. Thankfully, it was dismissed on our office’s own motion. This does not in any way make up for the hours that Mr. Williams spent in jail.” While Williams’ case has been expunged from the record, the prosecutor says that a legal technicality prevents it from being dismissed with prejudice.

The Williams case is unlikely to be the only false arrest based on faulty facial recognition technology. “The sheer scope of police face recognition use in this country means that others have almost certainly been—and will continue to be—misidentified, if not arrested and charged for crimes they didn’t commit,” writes Clare Garvie, a senior associate with Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology.

The good news is that more and more cities around the country are stepping in to stop the police use of facial recognition technology. Yesterday, Boston’s city council adopted an ordinance making it unlawful for any Boston official to “obtain, retain, possess, access, or use any face surveillance system or information derived from a face surveillance system.” It also bars Boston from entering into contracts with any third parties for such facial recognition services. And Boston police may not request facial surveillance information from outside agencies like the FBI, though they may use such info if such an agency provides it.

Earlier this month, tech giants Amazon and Microsoft declared temporary moratoria on selling their facial recognition services to law enforcement. That’s not nearly enough.

Given the growing prevalence of surveillance, Harvard cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier argued in a recent New York Times column that we “need to have a serious conversation about…how much we as a society want to be spied on by governments and corporations—and what sorts of influence we want them to have over our lives.” If we want to prevent a dystopian future of automated authoritarianism, strict limits on the government’s use of facial recognition technology is a good place to start.

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I recently posted Episode 6 of my new show, The Legal Academy, featuring Stanford Law professor Pamela Karlan.  You can watch here or below, and you can listen to an audio-only podcast version at Apple podcasts or Spotify.

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School boards across the U.S. are considering proposals to get rid of school resource officers (SROs), police officers assigned to patrol public schools.

San Francisco became the largest school district so far to move toward defunding its SRO program yesterday, as the San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education unanimously approved a resolution to end its memorandum of understanding with the San Francisco Police Department. Across the bay, the Oakland school board also voted unanimously yesterday to eliminate the district’s police department and shift its $2.5 million budget to student support services. Minneapolis, Portland, Denver, Seattle, and Charlottesville have also ended or suspended relationships with local police departments in recent weeks.

But similar proposals in other major cities have stalled under concerns that quickly disbanding SRO programs will leave schools defenseless against security threats. The Chicago Board of Education rejected a proposal yesterday to end its $33 million contract with the Chicago Police Department (CPD). 

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot opposed the proposal. “We all want change,” Lightfoot said prior to the vote. “But we want to do the right things. We don’t want to just do cosmetic changes or quick changes that end up creating more problems and make our communities and schools less safe.”

And in an 11-hour marathon session Tuesday, the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education, which oversees the second largest school district in the country, rejected three different proposals regarding school police, including one that would have gradually slashed its SRO budget by 90 percent.

Civil liberties groups and activists have been pressing to reduce the presence of police in schools for years, but with little success prior to the last month’s mass protests against abusive policing. They argue that the dramatic increase over the past few decades in SROs and in zero-tolerance policies, spurred by fears of mass shootings and drug crime, fuels the “school-to-prison pipeline” and leads to disproportionate enforcement against minority students for minor disturbances.

Reason recently reported on the expanded use of school resource officers in Florida following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018—and a troubling number of arrests and uses of force against children with autism.

The Oakland school board resolution noted that black students make up 26 percent of the district’s student population, yet account for 73 percent of student arrests. Likewise, the Chicago school board motion cited a study finding that black students made up 36 percent of all Chicago students but 66 percent of police notifications from 2011 through 2018, and that black girls experienced school-based policing at seven times the rate of white girls. In Seattle’s public schools, black students make up 14 percent of enrollment but half of referrals to police.

The National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO) argues that carefully selected, well-trained officers actually act as a filter and decrease arrests by building strong relationships within the school with staff and students.

“One thing that is so critical is that SROs have to be very carefully selected,” says NASRO executive director Mo Canady told Reason earlier this month. “This is the most high-profile position in law enforcement, and it has to be filled with people who have a sincere desire to work with students. Then the officer has to be specifically trained how to work with students and how to work in that school environment.”

But like policing at large, the proliferation of cell phone videos, policy body cameras, and social media has led to numerous viral incidents involving school resource officers. An Orlando SRO made national headlines last September when he arrested a six-year-old girl. 

In February, a school resource officer at a high school in Camden, Arkansas, was relieved of duty after video showed him putting a student in a chokehold and lifting the student off the ground. Last December, a North Carolina SRO was fired after he brutally body-slammed a middle-schooler. In November, a Broward County sheriff’s deputy in Florida was arrested and charged with child abuse after a video showed him body-slamming a 15-year-old girl at a special needs school.

Activists who supported the Chicago Board of Education proposal to end the school district’s contract with CPD cited a 2019 incident in which video showed CPD officers kicking, punching and tasing a 16-year-old girl.

The Justice Department’s 2017 report on unconstitutional policing in Chicago found that CPD officers used non-lethal force with abandon, including tasing children for non-criminal conduct or minor violations:

In one incident, officers hit a 16-year-old girl with a baton and then Tasered her after she was asked to leave the school for having a cell phone in violation of school rules. Officers were called in to arrest her for trespassing. Officers claimed the force was justified because she flailed her arms when they tried to arrest her, with no adequate explanation for how such flailing met the criteria for use of a Taser. This was not an isolated incident. We also reviewed incidents in which officers unnecessarily drive-stunned students to break up fights, including one use of a Taser in drive-stun mode against a 14-year-old girl. There was no indication in these files that these students’ conduct warranted use of the Taser instead of a less serious application of force.

Despite these long-simmering complaints, the speed at which school officials have moved to end SRO programs in the past few weeks has stunned both local police departments and NASRO.

“Before I was executive director for NASRO, I was a professional police officer for 25 years in a great community,” Canady said. “Loved what I got to do, loved serving the community, and for half of that time, my son was a supervisor of our school resource officers program. Just the opportunity to do what we did and connect with kids and communities, and the opportunity to make a difference in their lives—I have the feeling today that the work I did, and we did together, wasn’t enough. Sad is the best way I know to describe it.”

Critics feel differently. “We see that more SROs in schools correlates directly with the enrollment of black and brown students, not violence,” Luz Maria Henriquez of the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri told the St. Louis station KMOV. The result, she says, is “distrust and anxiety”—and sometimes worse.

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