NY Police Facial Recognition Program Slammed for Racial Bias

Despite garnering support from top Democrats such as Joe Biden and New York Gov.  Kathy Hochul, Adams’s vast expansion of controversial policing tactics, including support for controversial facial recognition technology, have left many anxious, reports The Guardian. Adams’ reinstatement of New York’s infamous plainclothes unit, an anti-crime squad of officers dressed in civilian clothing and tasked with targeting violent crime. Ahas been met with criticism given their legacy of violence, with many questioning his and NYPD commissioner Keechant Sewell’s promises that officers in the reinstated units would be vetted this time around for “emotional intelligence” and pointing out that past training has failed to yield reform. His calls for deep cuts to New York’s affordable housing and homelessness services have also aroused concern.

While Adams has also pledged to increase the use of facial recognition technology (FRT) to identify culprits of crime despite widespread pushback over the technology’s efficacy and use by police, critics have argued that such technology, in addition to being disproportionately used on New York’s minorities, is inaccurate. More FRT is placed in non-white areas of New York, despite the technology being notoriously inaccurate at identifying Black and Asian people and yielding multiple false arrests of primarily Black men. And although the NYPD has reported that FRT led to 2,878 arrests between October 2011 and 2018 out of 3,817 searches, experts have argued that such stats do not disclose if matches were made on the basis of photo editing or using reference images.