Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons^™

Facing Injustice: How Face Recognition Technology May Increase The Incidence Of Misidentifications And Wrongful Convictions, Laura M. Moy

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Does law enforcement use of face recognition technology paired with eyewitness identifications increase the incidence of wrongful convictions in U.S. criminal law? This Article explores this critical question and posits that the answer may be yes. Facial recognition is frequently used by law enforcement agencies to help generate investigative leads that are then presented to eyewitnesses for positive identification. But erroneous eyewitness accounts are the number one cause of wrongful convictions, and the use of face recognition to generate investigative leads may create the conditions for erroneous eyewitness identifications to take place. This is because face recognition technology is designed …

Facial Recognition And The Fourth Amendment, Andrew Ferguson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Facial recognition offers a totalizing new surveillance power. Police now have the capability to monitor, track, and identify faces through networked surveillance cameras and datasets of billions of images. Whether identifying a particular suspect from a still photo, or identifying every person who walks past a digital camera, the privacy and security impacts of facial recognition are profound and troubling.

This Article explores the constitutional design problem at the heart of facial recognition surveillance systems. One might hope that the Fourth Amendment – designed to restrain police power and enacted to limit governmental overreach – would have something to say …

A Taxonomy Of Police Technology’S Racial Inequity Problems, Laura M. Moy

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Over the past several years, increased awareness of racial inequity in policing, combined with increased scrutiny of police technologies, have sparked concerns that new technologies may aggravate inequity in policing. To help address these concerns, some advocates and scholars have proposed requiring police agencies to seek and obtain legislative approval before adopting a new technology, or requiring the completion of “algorithmic impact assessments” to evaluate new tools.

In order for policymakers, police agencies, or scholars to evaluate whether and how particular technologies may aggravate existing inequities, however, the problem must be more clearly defined. Some scholars have explored inequity in …