To The Surprise Of Absolutely No One, Cops Under Facial Recognition Bans Are Asking Other Agencies To Run Searches For Them

God forbid any of you peons break a law. It doesn’t matter if you only do it once. If you get caught, it’s all on you.

But if you’re a cop, laws are, at best, suggestions. Break them if you can. Ignore them when they’re inconvenient. And treat any law or court ruling that reins in officers (and/or protects constitutional rights) as optional unless there’s no way through it but to respect it.

Cops dodge warrant requirements for cell phone location data by buying data directly from third-party data brokers. Cops avoid local laws limiting civil asset forfeiture by asking the feds to “adopt” their latest stash of ill-gotten booty, allowing themselves to benefit directly from seizures otherwise restricted in their locales.

And, now that they’re subject to facial recognition tech bans in several places around the nation, they’re ignoring those laws too. Douglas MacMillan has the details for the Washington Post.

Officers in Austin and San Francisco — two of the largest cities where police are banned from using the technology — have repeatedly asked police in neighboring towns to run photos of criminal suspects through their facial recognition programs, according to a Washington Post review of police documents.

In San Francisco, the workaround didn’t appear to help. Since the city’s ban took effect in 2019, the San Francisco Police Department has asked outside agencies to conduct at least five facial recognition searches, but no matches were returned, according to a summary of those incidents submitted by the department to the county’s board of supervisors last year.

[…]

Austin police officers have received the results of at least 13 face searches from a neighboring police department since the city’s 2020 ban — and have appeared to get hits on some of them, according to documents obtained by The Post through public records requests and sources who shared them on the condition of anonymity.

By definition, these are isolated incidents. Roughly 99.9% of the nation is free of any facial recognition tech bans. And the number of violations reported here appear (that’s a very key word) to be extremely low given the number of theoretical opportunities available to law enforcement officers to break the law.

But let’s not pretend that means it’s ok. Any violation of the law is a violation of the law. No one’s letting you out of a speeding ticket because you generally follow the speed limit. And no court is just going to dismiss charges because it’s the only time you’ve ever murdered anyone.

True, violating facial recognition bans isn’t on par with murder. But it is on par with, at the very least, traffic violations. If we don’t get a free pass when we’ve been caught speeding, cops shouldn’t be given a free pass on facial recognition ban violations just because they haven’t violated the bans thousands of times.

The SFPD spokesperson confirmed no investigations were opened or officers disciplined for violating the ban by asking outside agencies to run searches for it. The same thing goes for the Austin PD, which only admitted the unlawful searches had been requested after being contacted by the Washington Post. It said vague things about an investigation, but the spokesperson said nothing that suggested people would be punished or steps would be taken to prevent further lawbreaking by the PD’s law enforcers.

But here’s the real heart of the issue: what’s reported here is most likely an undercount. These violations are likely occurring far more frequently. As the article points out, law enforcement agencies rarely like to discuss use of this tech, even when presenting evidence in court. What’s leaked out into the public domain via public records requests is most likely just the tip of the iceberg.

[E]nforcing these bans is difficult, experts said, because authorities often conceal their use of facial recognition. Even in places with no restrictions on the technology, investigators rarely mention its use in police reports. And, because facial recognition searches are not presented as evidence in court — legal authorities claim this information is treated as an investigative lead, not as proof of guilt — prosecutors in most places are not required to tell criminal defendants they were identified using an algorithm, according to interviews with defense lawyers, prosecutors and judges.

“Police are using it but not saying they are using it,” said Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s former district attorney, who said he was wary of prosecuting cases that may have relied on information the SFPD obtained in violation of the city’s ban.

Even if we take the numbers at face value, it’s still a problem. And it’s one that has existed as long as law enforcement agencies have existed. To law enforcers, laws are for other people. When they break them, it’s because they’re pursuing loftier goals, like public safety. When normal people do it, they’re just criminals. And because they’re criminals, every violation should be handled harshly. When cops do it, everyone is just expected to shrug it off as the cost of doing public safety business.

But we shouldn’t accept this, not even in limited quantities. And the cities and states that have passed these bans need to be right on top of this, demanding accountability and transparency from the law enforcement agencies they oversee. If they’re assuming cops won’t break laws they don’t like, they’re stupider than the cops they’re overseeing and twice as stupid as cops think their overseers are. If you can’t keep this from happening, why even bother passing laws?