Dallas Police Department officials hope using a facial recognition system will help close more cases, identify suspects and save time for investigators. The company they want to hire to do the job has faced years of criticism — and a class-action lawsuit that raised questions about how its data is collected.
Police officials also told council members at Monday’s Public Safety Committee meeting, that while general orders to govern the facial recognition technology have yet to be finalized, the department has already used it in a few investigations.
“What we have seen in the couple instances of where we’ve used this, we’ve been able to shorten that investigation,” Dallas Police Department Dallas Police Department Major Stephen Williams said. “What might take, you know, two three days, we can do within 12 hours.”
At first, a spokesperson for the department told KERA the department has not been using the technology.
“The Department does not currently have the technology or conduct searches,” department spokesperson Kirstin Lowman told KERA. “We have worked with partner agencies that utilize the technology in investigations.”
KERA asked for more clarification around if other law enforcement agencies had helped with Dallas specific investigations — and whether those agencies’ policies around using facial recognition software governed Dallas’ “few instances.”
“Correct,” Lowman said in an email. “Yes. That would be our understanding.”
Police officials assured council members the technology would be used with caution — and not used to positively identify someone without additional evidence.
“This is merely a lead in a criminal investigation,” Williams said during the meeting. “This is not an affirmative, 100% ‘that’s the individual and we’re going to go issue an arrest warrant.’ We’re not.”
40 billion images
Police officials say the job will be done by Clearview AI. The company has had its own share of controversy, including a class-action lawsuit and concerns over how the data was gathered and who has access to it.
The tech company, which was founded in 2017 by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, offers a tool that will “help generate high-quality investigative leads,” according to its website.
The group’s clients include law enforcement, government and foreign and domestic military agencies.
The company boasts a “revolutionary web-based intelligence platform” that utilizes a database of more than 40 billion facial images — the largest of its kind, according to the group. The company gathered the images from multiple sources including social media apps and mugshots.
But critics of the platform — and who uses it — have voiced concerns over privacy issues related to the application.
In 2020, CBS Texas reported that the Fort Worth, Irving and Plano police departments had used Clearview's then-app based platform on a "trial basis."
A 2021 BuzzFeed News investigation found that many departments across the country were also using the platform on a trail basis. That includes the Dallas Police Department, according to the investigation.
BuzzFeed reported that officers used the app to make around 500 to 1000 searches. A comment from a department spokesperson included in the investigation says at the time, the department didn't have a contract with Clearview.
"Officers found using this app were instructed to remove the app from their city issued devices. Officers we found using the app on their personal devices were instructed not to use the app as part of their job functions," the spokesperson reportedly told BuzzFeed.
A 2022 a settlement between the company and the American Civil Liberties Union changed that trial process. It also barred Clearview from allowing access to its database to private individuals and entities — “subject to narrow exceptions.”
The settlement was silent on the company selling the algorithm – without the database of billions of photos — to corporations, according to reporting by The New York Times.
After the settlement the Times reported that Clearview executives said they would start offering the platform to lawyers and public defenders.
KERA asked the department if it thought Clearview was the right choice in vendor given the controversy over the past few years. Lowman said in an email the contract is still in procurement — and would not comment on the company's past controversies or the incident with Dallas police officers using the analysis app on their phones.
'Two sets of eyes'
Dallas will join many other agencies across the country that are using facial recognition technology. That includes agencies in Fort Worth, Baltimore, New York City, Miami and Los Angeles.
Analysts who will be tasked with generating the facial recognition analyses will be required to attend an “extensive” 32-hour training on implicit bias and how to avoid “misidentification.” The training is an FBI program a spokesperson from the department told KERA.
Williams said this software could be a solution in identifying possible suspects.
“The solution is going to scrape the internet for all these publicly posted photos that everybody posts on social media, the news media, everything,” Williams said. “It uses AI to identify and compare millions of images and then its used by police agencies across the country.”
Here's how it works: If a photo of a possible suspect surfaces during an investigation, the detective submits the case for a “facial recognition analysis.”
That request gets sent to a fusion center — an information hub that connects and coordinates multiple regional law enforcement agencies — and assigned an analyst, who make sure the case meets the requirements to use the software.
From there another analyst repeats the same process to see if they agree with the first analysis.
“Its really putting two sets of eyes on the results to ensure that we’re getting a positive or negative…really to mitigate any misidentification that might be occurring,” Williams said.
If there’s a disagreement the request gets sent to supervisor for a final opinion. The results of the analysis are submitted to the detective — but copies are not kept in the fusion center.
Williams said the technology will not be leveraged to identify people on live feeds or during live-streamed events. But they did say large scale events do create additional photos for the software to draw on.
“The more publicity and attention that we get from these public events that people publicly post photos, that helps in the process and the bigger solution of how we identify individuals and people and places,” Williams said.
Council approval?
Cara Mendelsohn, who represents District 12 on the city council, said she agreed with the approach.
“Policing is changing,” Mendelson said. “We have to leverage technology that is available to us to help take people off the street, especially that habitual criminal.”
Other council members seemed to be on the same page as Mendelsohn and police executives.
“Any way that we can take time off of what [investigators] need to do their job, I am absolutely supportive of,” District 13 Council Member Gay Donnell Willis said. “It seems like it’s the right time and place for Dallas to have this.”
Department officials said they did not discuss the issue with other council members not on the Public Safety Committee. And they added they don’t need to seek council approval to pay for the software.
Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia asked council members if the department was “okay to move forward,” which the committee unanimously approved.
Police officials told the committee that after the software is implemented, they will brief council members on how its being used — and if its helped solve any cases.
Got a tip? Email Nathan Collins at ncollins@kera.org. You can follow Nathan on Twitter @nathannotforyou.
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