<https://www.fastcompany.com/90440198/san-diegos-massive-7-year-experiment-wi...> Since 2012, the city’s law enforcement agencies have compiled over 65,000 face scans and tried to match them against a massive mugshot database. But it’s almost completely unclear how effective the initiative was, with one spokesperson saying they’re unaware of a single arrest or prosecution that stemmed from the program. At the stroke of midnight on December 31, the City of San Diego’s long experiment with facial recognition technology came to an abrupt end. For seven years, police had used a sophisticated network of as many as 1,300 mobile cameras (smartphones and tablets) and compiled a database of some 65,500 face scans—placing California’s second-largest city at the center of a national debate about surveillance, privacy concerns, and algorithmic bias. Now, after the California legislature instituted a three-year ban on police use of mobile facial recognition technology, one of the nation’s most overhyped and least well-understood policing tools has been switched off. Some local police are frustrated, and privacy advocates are optimistic. But it’s almost completely unclear how effective the initiative was, since the city’s law enforcement agencies didn’t track the results. And a police spokesperson told me that they were unaware of any arrests or prosecutions tied to the use of facial recognition technology. Introduced in secrecy Introduced in 2012 by the countywide San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) without any public hearing or notice, the Tactical Identification System (TACIDS) gave law enforcement officials access to software that focuses on unique textures and patterns in the face—ear shape, hair, skin color—using the distance between the eyes as a baseline. In less than two seconds, the software compares those unique identifiers to a mugshot database of 1.8 million images collected by the San Diego County Sheriff’s office. The system, whose software is supplied by surveillance vendor FaceFirst, is part of a larger database called the Automated Justice Information Systems (ARJIS), a network formed by city and county agencies to provide criminal justice information services to each other. In all, 30 law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration & Customs Enforcement, had access to TACIDS. But it was the San Diego Police Department that used the system the most, which the department says reflects the size of its police force (over 1,900 officers). According to SDPD, the department used facial recognition scans more than 8,000 times in 2018, almost double the number in 2016, which it says was largely due to the formation of a new division, Neighborhood Policing Division (formed in March of 2018), aimed at addressing the issue of homelessness. SDPD equipped officers in the new division with TACIDS devices to help identify homeless people, who often do not have identification. San Diego’s love affair with surveillance technology extends beyond just TACIDS. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for digital privacy, the city has the highest concentration of surveillance technologies of any of the 23 counties that comprise the northern side of the U.S.-Mexico border. The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department also uses tattoo matching software from a national vendor, DataWorks Plus. And a license plate reader system supplied by Vigilant Solutions has often been coupled with TACIDS, although in May of this year, San Diego quietly ceased sharing license plate data with federal agencies, including Border Patrol and other Department of Homeland Security agencies. And for several years the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office, as well as some smaller police departments in the county, have been operating drones to photograph crime scenes, locate homeless encampments, and assist with emergency response. Records on face recognition use obtained through a public records request. [Screenshot: EFF] As an early adopter of such technologies, the city is no stranger to controversy. Back in 2015, a program to have San Diego school kids log in to their iPads via facial recognition was canceled amid a public outcry. And a few months ago, the city’s smart street light program, which uses cameras and microphones to collect anonymous data such as vehicle counts, pedestrian movements, and temperature, sparked widespread protests. Statewide, concerns about the expanded use of facial recognition technology in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities led to pressure on lawmakers to pass the ban. Back in the fall, the American Civil Liberties Union found that when it ran photos of California state legislators through Amazon’s Rekognition software, the program mistakenly matched 20% of them (more than half of whom were lawmakers of color) to mugshots in a massive state law enforcement database. Community leaders, such as San Diego Councilmember Monica Montgomery, have raised concerns about the accuracy of the matches made by TACIDS and say that it violates the civil liberties of residents. The lawmaker, who represents the city’s Fourth Council District and is the chair of the city’s Committee on Public Safety & Livable Neighborhoods, has “stood with advocates in voicing concerns over surveillance capabilities and how these capabilities are utilized,” according to a spokesperson. Now, the department is prepared for a return to traditional policing. “We will be terminating the usage of the [TACIDS-enabled] devices,” says a SDPD spokesperson, noting that since the department is only the end user of the program, no department face data is stored in the devices. “The only biometric technology we will be utilizing is fingerprint scanners.” “When I showed him his booking photo, his jaw dropped” Over the last seven years, the program has been used in a variety of ways, both controversial and laudable. TACIDS has enabled officers to connect homeless people with service providers and identify drug overdose victims so that the victim’s families could be alerted. But it’s also been criticized for its use in cases where people were photographed without their consent—including an African American man driving by his grandmother’s house and a retired firefighter who had a dispute with a man he claimed was a prowler—to determine whether they had criminal records. (They didn’t.) Law enforcement officials who work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement have been particularly positive about their experience using TACIDS. An ICE agent told the Center for Investigative Reporting about using the device during a warrant sweep in Oceanside. When he ran a man’s photo through the system, he found out that the suspect was in the country illegally and had a 2003 DUI conviction in San Diego. “I whipped out the Droid (smartphone) and snapped a quick photo and submitted for search,” the immigration agent wrote in his testimonial for the Automated Regional Justice Information System. “The subject looked inquisitively at me not knowing the truth was only 8 seconds away. I received a match of 99.96 percent. This revealed several prior arrests and convictions and provided me an FBI #. When I showed him his booking photo, his jaw dropped.” [...]