Lightfoot urged to pull the plug on facial recognition technology

A coalition of 75 civil liberties groups led by the Lucy Parsons Project calls the system used by the Chicago Police Department “racially-discriminatory, inaccurate and highly-biased.”

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A coalition of 75 civil liberties groups delivered an open letter to Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Tuesday demanding a ban on the use of facial recognition technology in Chicago.

A coalition of 75 civil liberties groups delivered an open letter to Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Tuesday demanding a ban on the use of facial recognition technology in Chicago.

Fran Spielman/Chicago Sun-Times

Mayor Lori Lightfoot was urged Tuesday to pull the plug on the Chicago Police Department’s use of a “racially-discriminatory, inaccurate and highly-biased” facial recognition tool that matches images of unknown suspects to three billion photos scraped from social media.

Freddy Martinez, executive director of Lucy Parsons Labs, said the police department’s “quiet acquisition” of facial recognition technology developed by Manhattan-based Clearview has “threatened the civil rights, due process and civil liberties of everyone” in Chicago.

At a City Hall news conference that included more cameras than participants, Martinez bemoaned how cheap and easy it is to collect “so much information off of one person’s face that you can create an entire profile — where they live....where they worship.”

“This is why facial recognition technology in particular poses such a deep threat that we don’t think that there are any meaningful uses for it in the city. Not just policing. We should not using this in any context,” he said.

“No more testing of racially-biased technologies on Chicagoans….We call on the mayor to… put a full moratorium on the use of facial recognition technology.”

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Freddy Martinez, executive director of the Lucy Parsons Labs, says the Chicago Police Department’s “quiet acquisition” of facial recognition technology developed by Manhattan-based Clearview has “threatened the civil rights, due process and civil liberties of everyone” in Chicago.

Fran Spielman/Chicago Sun-Times

Martinez cited a recent study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology that found “some algorithms” of facial recognition technology are “100 times more inaccurate against black women than they are against white male faces.”

“In the Civil Rights Act, you’re not supposed to allocate federal funds — or any kind of funds— to discriminatory, racially-biased programs. This is why we say that we shouldn’t be testing out these racially discriminatory programs on people,” Martinez said.

“And it’s not our opinion, it’s the federal government’s testing that has shown that these things are extremely biased against darker skinned individuals, young people, the elderly and things like that. For us, it’s an issue of racial equity and the city should really engage in halting its use.”

The letter to Lightfoot demanding a ban was signed by a #PressPause Chicago coalition comprised of 75 civil liberties groups that includes the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois and the National Lawyers Guild.

Muhammad Sankari, lead organizer for the Arab-American Action Network, the only other participant at the news conference, pointed to the gang database as just one example of the Chicago Police Department’s “long history…of criminalizing communities based on shoddy information.”

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Muhammad Sankari, lead organizer for the Arab-American Action Network, points to Chicago’s controversial gang database as evidence of the city’s “long history of criminalizing communities based on shoddy information.”

Fran Spielman/Chicago Sun-Times

“Peoples’ lives have been destroyed by this kind of technology,” he said.

“This technology is racially biased and it is flawed…We do not want racially-biased facial recognition technology being implemented by the Chicago Police Department….We are calling on the mayor — not for conversation. Not for reform. But for a full ban on facial recognition technology in the city of Chicago.”

Lightfoot responded to the demand for a ban for reiterating her campaign promise to create a “working group” to review the city’s “current use of this technology.”

In a statement, the mayor said she has been “assured repeatedly by the Chicago Police Department and the relevant vendors” that CPD “does not utilize any live Facial Recognition Technology or software, which uses dynamic algorithms in video technology to identify individuals in a live or real-time environment.”

Last week, Interim Police Supt. Charlie Beck argued that the CPD needs the tool and doesn’t abuse it and that, without it, fewer crimes would be solved.

“It’s never used as the sole tool for making an arrest. It’s a pointer system. It is a clue. It has to be backed up by other articles of evidence that, in and of themselves, support a prosecution,” he said.

“Without all of that other evidence — be it DNA, be it fingerprints, be it witness ID — there is no case.”

Beck acknowledged that there is a privacy debate raging across the nation about facial recognition. But he blamed it on, more of a “misunderstanding” about the system than any abuse of it.

“We have a very limited amount of people who are able to use the facial recognition system that has social media access. We don’t use it in crowd-sourcing. We don’t use it during First Amendment activities. ... CPD is certainly not using it in any way that is beyond the scope of the professional standard,” he said.

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