Police Facial Recognition Technology Can’t Tell Black People Apart

Thaddeus L. Johnson and Natasha N. Johnson write:

… Our research supports fears that facial recognition technology (FRT) can worsen racial inequities in policing. We found that law enforcement agencies that use automated facial recognition disproportionately arrest Black people. We believe this results from factors that include 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.

While no amount of improvement will eliminate the possibility of racial profiling, we understand the value of automating the time-consuming, manual face-matching process.