Criminal Justice Use of Facial Recognition Essay Sample

TO: Congressional Oversight Committee
FROM: Name
DATE:
SUBJECT: Criminal Justice Use of Facial Recognition
The advancement in technology has been one of the greatest achievements of mankind, yet it still creates worrisome situations. One of the technological advancements that have captured the attention of many is facial recognition technology (FRT). It is a technology that matches two or more facial images, based on a person’s facial features, to determine the identity of a person (Santamaria, 2020). FRT has many uses, including in law enforcement. While this technology presents law enforcement with an opportunity to identify suspects of criminal activity and prevent future crime, Mann and Smith (2017) indicate that it is invasive to privacy and may infringe civil liberties. Also, there are concerns about the accuracy of FRT in the identification of suspects as well as algorithmic bias (Singer & Metz, 2019). Thus, it is prudent that this committee places stringent measures to regulate the use of FRT in law enforcement and the criminal justice system in general.
Existing Legal Frameworks
The current legal frameworks are ambiguous when it comes to the use of FRT in the criminal justice system. No clear laws are governing or addressing some of the concerns related to the use of FRT by law enforcement in the federal government (New York City Bar, 2020). This raises concerns because the federal government has put in place a law regulating the use of FRT in the private sector, but not in the government sector. However, there have been several bills introduced by representatives and senators that touch on the use of FRT at the federal government level (New York City Bar, 2020). The first bill is the No Biometric Barriers to Housing Act, which was introduced in 2019 to prevent the use of facial recognition and other biometric technology in specific rental units. This was to control the use of FRT by law enforcement in federal public housing. The second bill is the Biometric Identification Transnational Migration Alert Program Authorization Act (BITMAP), also introduced in 2019. It encourages the use of FRT and other biometric technology to facilitate border security through the voluntary sharing of biometric data among foreign governments as well as US federal agencies. The law indicates that any data collected on US citizens should be deleted although the data may be stored for intelligence or security purposes (New York City Bar, 2020). The two federal laws discussed above, however, do not regulate the use of FRT. They only provide the where or the how, respectively, FRT can be used by law enforcement officers.
It is worth noting that currently, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which is the primary federal law enforcement agency, has two programs dedicated to the use of FRT. The first program is referred to as the Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System (NGI-IPS) and the second is referred to as the Facial Analysis, Comparison, and Evaluation (FACE) (Finkleaet al., 2020). NGI-IPS facilitates facial recognition searches by authorized federal, state, and local law enforcement officers. However, there are guidelines in the use of NGI-IPS to ensure accurate identification of suspects. For insta...