AI Case Study

"Police departments across the nation are generating leads and making arrests by feeding celebrity photos, CGI renderings, and manipulated images into facial recognition software.

Often unbeknownst to the public, law enforcement is identifying suspects based on “all manner of ‘probe photos,’ photos of unknown individuals submitted for search against a police or driver license database,” a study published on Thursday by the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology reported.

The study provides several real-life examples of police using probe photos in facial recognition searches.

On April 28, 2017, a suspect was caught on camera allegedly stealing beer from a CVS in New York City. When the pixelated surveillance footage produced zero hits on the New York Police Department's (NYPD) facial recognition system, a detective swapped the image for one of actor Woody Harrelson, claiming the suspect resembled the movie star, in order to generate hits.

Harrelson’s photo returned a list of candidates, including a person who was identified by NYPD as the suspect and arrested for petit larceny.

The NYPD also fed an image of a New York Knicks player (whose name was redacted in police documents provided to the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology) into its facial recognition system in order to find a Brooklyn man wanted for assault.

These are just two cases of police trying to brute force leads from facial recognition technology using dubious images.

NYPD records show that it made 2,878 arrests stemming from facial recognition searches in five years. Florida law enforcement agencies run roughly 8,000 of these searches per month, according to documents from the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office.

Departments are also using poorly-drawn probe images in facial recognition searches, such as a forensic sketch that was fed into Amazon’s facial recognition software, Rekognition, by police in Washington County, Oregon.

Low-quality and filtered photos pulled from social media are also valid, police guidance documents show, according to the study.

According to a presentation by the NYPD’s Facial Identification Section (FIS), detectives may: replace an open mouth with a closed one; add a pair of open eyes sourced from a Google image search; clone areas of the face; and combine “two face photographs of different people whom detectives think look similar to generate a single image to be searched.”

NYPD and other agencies have also used 3D modeling software to fill in missing facial data, according to the study. This means that a photo showing 60 percent of a suspect’s face could be given a 95 percent confidence rating—a lenience not applied to evidence such as partial fingerprints.

“As far as we know, a court has never weighed in on whether facial recognition produces reliable results,” Garvie said. The reason for this is largely that law enforcement agencies and prosecutors aren’t handing over information about these searches to the defense to be challenged, she said.

“Given the degree to which law enforcement relies on the results of facial recognition searches to make arrests, this in my opinion is a violation of due process,” Garvie added.

Civil rights advocates have objected to the use of facial recognition systems by police given the technology’s lack of accuracy and racial bias.

Several police departments in the US, including those in New York and Los Angeles, have committed to purchasing real-time facial recognition technology, and experts are especially concerned about its potential use if applied to body cameras."