Mayor Bill de Blasio has pledged tighter restrictions on the NYPD's use of facial recognition software, after Gothamist reported that police deployed the controversial technology against a prominent Black Lives Matter activist earlier this month.
"We have to be very careful and very limited with our use of anything involving facial recognition," the mayor said on Monday. "Those standards need to be reassessed. It's something I will do with my team and with the NYPD."
The department admitted Friday that they'd used facial recognition technology in their investigation of Derrick Ingram, a 28-year-old activist facing a misdemeanor assault charge for allegedly shouting into an officer's ear with a bullhorn during a protest.
As dozens of NYPD officers — accompanied by police dogs, drones and helicopters — besieged Ingram’s Hell's Kitchen apartment earlier this month, an officer was seen on video holding a report from the department's Facial Identification Section. The piece of paper also included a photo of Ingram taken from his Instagram.
A spokesperson for the NYPD claimed that the artificial intelligence tool is used to compare "a still image from a surveillance video to a pool of lawfully possessed arrest photos." The department did not respond to follow-up inquiries about how a photo posted to Instagram fit into either of those categories.
In March, the NYPD issued its first official standards around facial recognition software, following revelations that it had quietly worked with Clearview, a firm that collects photos of Americans without their consent. Civil liberties advocates criticized the guidelines as overly broad, while noting that the nascent technology has proven to be less accurate on people of color.
Currently, the department’s Patrol Guide allows police to run facial recognition searches on anyone suspected of a crime or anyone who may have witnessed a crime. The NYPD has previously stated that the technology is not used to “monitor and identify people in crowds or rallies.”
But according to Jerome Greco, supervising attorney for the Legal Aid Society’s Digital Forensics Unit, the department’s self-imposed rules could enable wide-scale use of facial recognition surveillance at political demonstrations.
“This policy as it currently stands has the potential to be used as a wide dragnet to identify people who are at a protest, who happen to witness an alleged crime, regardless of whether they had any part in it or any other knowledge involving it,” he said.
Earlier this year, Manhattan State Senator Brad Hoylman proposed legislation that would ban the use of biometric surveillance technology — including facial recognition software — until a regulatory task force is established.
The NYPD’s use of the technology on a Black Lives Matter activist, Hoylman said, “is only further proof that allowing them to set their own policy results in no meaningful protections for New Yorkers.”
On Monday, de Blasio suggested that police should use facial recognition technology in very limited circumstances, such as for counter-terrorism investigations.
“Facial recognition has no place as a tool to in any way undermine or affect public expression or public protest,” he said. “We need to be very sparing in our use of facial recognition technology.”
The mayor claimed the NYPD's investigation into Ingram was not approved by high-level police officials, adding that his office would provide further details about who signed off on the operation and the use of facial recognition software.
Requests for more information from the NYPD and the Mayor’s Office were not returned.
