Nora Grace-Flood photo
Chief Sullivan: What if technology improves?
A proposed ordinance that promises to ban town use and acquisition of facial recognition technology has moved one step closer to approval, sparked by concerns about bias and wrongly charged criminal suspects.
The proposed legislation, co-sponsored by Council members Brad Macdowall and Austin Cesare, would prohibit the Town of Hamden from accessing or utilizing any facial recognition systems and/or information extracted from said systems.
The proposal was unanimously passed the Hamden Legislative Council’s Administration Committee on Wednesday night. It now goes before the full Council for approval.
The discussion and vote on setting proactive parameters around such software arrived at the Council roughly four months after BuzzFeed News published a report listing the Hamden Police Department as one of thousands of taxpayer-funded entities that had run at least one facial recognition scan as of February 2020.
The Hamden Quinnipiac News Network later reported that HPD had received a free trial of the technology from Clearview AI early that year. Read more about Clearview AI and its controversial practices in this New York Times article.
Nora Grace-Flood photo
Brad Macdowall addresses the Legislative Council on Wednesday.
“The Hamden Legislative Council finds that the benefits of using facial recognition are outweighed by its harms,” the proposed ordinance states, citing legal threats posed by the technology to civil rights and civil liberties; histories of disproportionate inaccuracies by the technology in identifying the faces of people of color, youth, and women; and concerns that information from facial recognition technology would be incorporated into databases and systems that are already plagued by racial biases.
Some law enforcement agencies have praised the technology for helping to solve crimes. Some critics have noted particular higher rates of wrongly identified suspects of color.
Some Council members Wednesday night vocally opposed any acquisition of facial recognition technology, supporting the proposal’s firm and total rejection of such software. “I’m 100 percent against it,” said Councilwoman Athena Gary. “This could hurt Black and brown people way more than it could hurt anyone else… I don’t think it would benefit my people at all.”
Others were more hesitant to move forward with the policy. Councilwoman Valerie Horsley suggested the conversation oversteps given that the Hamden police department is not currently using facial recognition technology
“It feels like we’re solving a problem that doesn’t exist, and oftentimes when you try to fix a problem that doesn’t exist, you create more problems,” she said.
“We don’t want to get ourselves in a situation where we can’t identify a murder victim because we have an ordinance on the books.”
Horsley said she would like to see the suggested legislation revised to limit the ban to a set amount of time, such as “three to five years,” and to allow for usage in “extreme circumstances.”
Police Chief John Sullivan questioned the reach of the ordinance. He said that while the department is not “currently looking to acquire facial recognition technology,” he could imagine doing so in the future if the “rapidly developing technology” becomes less discriminatory, more precise and normalized across communities.
The chief asked whether he would be permitted to work on cases with the FBI if they were utilizing facial recognition software. Macdowall asserted that state and federal powers supersede Hamden’s authority, and pointed out that individuals will not be barred from accessing such software; the ordinance applies only to the town and government officials.
Macdowall added that at any point in time, future councils could revisit the ordinance and choose to revise the legislation. He suggested passing the ordinance as a preventive measure based on the current concerns with such software.
But he asked Council Attorney Sue Gruen to create language to address Councilwoman Horsley’s concern before the Council votes in full on Sept. 20.
The approval of the developing legislation marked a rare moment of unity and compromise within the Council. Cesare, a conservative Council member serving his last term on Council, noted that he usually sees things very differently from Macdowall, one of the Council’s most progressive representatives. “It’s nice to agree on something,” he said.
Why are people so dumb. You have a tool that could solve cases prevent crime and yet you don't want to use it. People getting killed all over. Stop being pollical enough is enough. We should use all the tools we can.