Members of the Hamden Legislative Council passed bipartisan legislation prohibiting facial recognition technology out of committee Wednesday night.
The legislation, introduced by Councilmen at-large Brad Macdowall (D) and Austin Cesare (R), would prevent the town of Hamden from using any level of facial recognition systems with no exceptions. According to the legislation, facial recognition “poses unique and significant civil rights and civil liberties threats” to Hamden residents.
Facial recognition systems are computer programs designed to search images for human faces and identify the person in the photograph. Once the software creates a “faceprint,” a map of the face, it runs through a database of faces, allowing it to cross-reference and identify the person in the original image.
A common concern for the legislators was the threat of the “big brother” government that could watch whoever they want, whenever they want. The only member of the public that spoke at the meeting’s public portion also cited those concerns.
“I really don’t think that we should have facial recognition at all,” said Patricia Vener-Saavedra, a Hamden resident. “It’s a technology that’s not very well designed, and if it was well-designed, it’s also an invasion of privacy. I really don’t want to live in “big brother’s” world, and that’s where we’re going.”
The bill was created to preempt the adoption of facial recognition technology according to Cesare, who said that the council has an obligation to set limits on its use. While the Hamden Police Department (HPD) does not currently use facial recognition technology, HQNN reported last year that the department had received a free software trial from tech startup Clearview AI in early 2020. After questioning at the meeting, Chief of Police John Sullivan informed the council that the HPD has no plans to pursue the technology at this time.
While privacy concerns were the main point of debate, facial recognition technology has a history of inaccuracy, primarily and disproportionately misidentifying people of color. The 2018 Gender Shades Project tested three gender classification algorithms, which grouped subjects into four categories: darker males, darker females, lighter males and lighter females. All three algorithms consistently identified lighter-skinned subjects more than 90% of the time, while none of them reached 90% for darker-skinned subjects. All three performed the worst on darker-skinned females, where one of the programs was correct just over 65% of the time.
“Prejudice and profiling is something that we’ve always had a problem with when it comes to policing, right?” Council Justin Farmer said (D-5).
Farmer, who is one of the three Black district representatives in Hamden, compared the need for the legislation to ban practices rooted in racial bias. “Stop-and-frisk,” a non-intrusive police stop and search of a suspect, disproportionately affected people of color. It was found unconstitutional in 2013 in context to the New York Police Department by a federal judge.
“Where do we draw the line between prevention and people’s civil liberties?”
– Council Justin Farmer
Farmer, who has proposed two ordinances creating police reform, reiterated that a conversation around what “policing looks like” in Hamden needs to be a community effort.
Although the bill was largely supported by the council, some proposed changes. Councilwoman Valeria Horsley (D-4) advocated for an exception to allow the HPD to use facial recognition when there is probable cause, as well as for clarifications for the private use of facial recognition technology by government officials. Horsley also proposed exemptions for “extreme circumstances” and a“timeout frame,” both of which were denied by MacDowell. He argued that there is never a need for the software and that any future council can change the laws as it sees fit.
“I would argue that even in the most extreme circumstances, the likelihood for improper identification because of the limitations of the technology at this stage would still remain present,” MacDowell said.
Additional language addressing Horsley’s concerns will be added to the legislation when the full legislative council meets on Sept. 20.