The Albuquerque Police Department is now using facial recognition technology as an investigative tool.
The APD says it has been looking into the possibilities of this technology for the past two years, and has now found a system strong enough to be put into use. It works by matching images of criminal suspects against a mugshot database maintained by the police, going through 250,000 records in the process. Recently, the system was used to identify a shoplifter caught on surveillance video.
As seems to be increasingly the case with such deployments, civil liberties advocates are already raising concerns about the use of the technology, with an ACLU spokesperson expressing concern about how the APD might expand the use of its facial recognition system. But speaking to ABC KOAT 7 Albuquerque, APD Real Time Crime Center Director T.J. Wilham was eager to emphasize the limits to the police’s use of the technology, saying that it will only be used on “people who have been arrested, who’ve been charged with a crime, inside the city of Albuquerque.” Wilham added that it’s only one of a set of tools used by the police, saying, “We’d never make an arrest just solely based off of a facial recognition hit.”
Source: ABC KOAT 7 Albuquerque
—
October 19, 2015 – by Alex Perala
Follow Us