Milwaukee PD Wants To Trade 2.5 Million Mugshots For Free Facial Recognition Tech

Maybe Clearview got it all wrong. Scraping the web for tens of billions of records for free sounds like a good business model, but that model only works if you can keep the malodorous funk of your work from soaking into your reputation. Clearview's tactics have gotten it banned, fined, and sued and it doesn't seem that its multitudinous contracts with government agencies will keep it in the black for years to come.

Other companies dealing in what used to be cop tech (that was war tech before it was cop tech) are making in-roads with private citizens before asking cops to come along for the ride. Since the early adopters are homeowners associations and gated communities, it's only natural that these public-private partnerships have developed because law enforcement has historically been more inclined to protect the white and rich, leaving everyone else to fend for themselves.

But this is a new twist: here's a government agency seeking to leverage its stash of photos to obtain questionable tech for free.

Milwaukee police are mulling a trade: 2.5 million mugshots for free use of facial recognition technology.

Officials from the Milwaukee Police Department say swapping the photos with the software firm Biometrica will lead to quicker arrests and solving of crimes. But that benefit is unpersuasive for those who say the trade is startling, due to the concerns of the surveillance of city residents and possible federal agency access.

We recognize the very delicate balance between advancement in technology and ensuring we as a department do not violate the rights of all of those in this diverse community," Milwaukee Police Chief of Staff Heather Hough said during an April 17 meeting.

This is a really strange trade. Mugshots have generally been considered to be public domain, accessible even without the hassle of public records requests. While it's obviously more convenient for Biometrica to get all of these at one time, it never really needed the MPD's help to add these photos to its facial recognition database.

Chief Hough's statement doesn't really help. While Hough isn't her predecessors, the PD already has a history of being dishonest about its surveillance tech acquisitions. And if her department were truly interested in respecting the rights of a diverse community, it would have disbanded. Show me a cop shop that respects rights regularly and I'll show you my Blue Bloods fanfic.

To be completely fair, no such deal has taken place yet. And the PD is actually presenting it to the public for comment before moving forward. However, no promises have been made, which means the PD might do this anyway, even if most commenters are against it.

And its assurances that it really desires input from the public are undercut by the fact that it's already using facial recognition tech, albeit one it's paying for, rather than the one it can get for free by feeding faces to Biometrica's database.

At the meeting, officials shared how the technology had been used in recent cases - a homicide and a sexual assault - to assist in identifying suspects. In both cases, police ran photos of men ultimately charged in the crimes through facial recognition technology to help identify them. Those identifications were then confirmed during the investigation, police said.

So, what do 2.5 million mugshots (and their accompanying arrest records) buy you in the facial recognition market? Not a lot, it turns out. Biometrica will give the PD two free search licenses. If the PD wants more, the price is $12,000 per license after that.

Even if the little people end up not mattering, at least voices with some power are expressing their concerns. One Fire and Police commissioner, Krissie Fung, said she was unconvinced" this trade was necessary and that city residents should have the final say.

Another commissioner has already been a victim of the tech's innate fallibility, which is the result of bias present in the inputs, as well as the bias of those making decisions based on search results.

During the April 17 meeting, Fire and Police commissioner Ramon Evans said he had been subject to bias by facial recognition while at Potawatomi Casino.

I got called over and I wasn't the guy," he said. I was a victim of error."

The government should not be trading public records for discounts on surveillance tech. If the PD truly has a need for this, it should be able to demonstrate that with enough clarity that it would have no problem securing the funding. This looks like nothing more than the PD trying to do something just because it can, rather than because it actually thinks the tech will be a net gain for the city and its residents. For that reason alone, this proposal should be rejected. And the city government should take steps going forward to ensure agencies can't use forcibly obtained data to horse-trade for private sector goods.