August 11th 2023.
The latest reports prove that using facial recognition technology will have dire consequences on racial inequities in policing. Thaddeus L. Johnson and Natasha N. Johnson, two criminal justice experts, have written an op-ed on the issue and have revealed some research that proves that Black people are arrested at disproportionately high rates due to artificial intelligence being unable to distinguish between darker faces.
In their article in Scientific American, they write that this is likely due to the lack of Black faces in the algorithms’ training data sets, a belief that these programs are infallible, and a tendency of officers’ own biases to magnify these issues. They also stress that civil rights advocates have been pointing out this issue for years.
A perfect example of this is Porcha Woodruff, a 32-year-old pregnant Black woman who was wrongfully arrested in February 2023 by the Detroit Police Department. She was trying to get her children ready for school when facial recognition technology identified her as a suspect in a robbery and carjacking a month prior. The case was ultimately dismissed since the victim never showed up to court.
This incident has prompted Detroit Police Chief James White to take action. He declared it “very poor” police work by his officers and wants to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. The Detroit Police Department will not be allowed “to use facial-recognition-derived images in a photographic lineup” after the new policies are presented to the Detroit Police Board of Commissioners.
It’s clear that facial recognition technology has serious implications for the racial inequities present in policing. Civil rights advocates and tech experts have been warning us of this for years and the recent case of Porcha Woodruff highlights the need for change. Hopefully, the new policies implemented by the Detroit Police Department will prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.
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