Lawton City Council Approves Clearview AI Policy for Police Use

The Lawton, Oklahoma City Council voted 8-0 this week to adopt a formal policy governing the Lawton Police Department’s use of Clearview AI facial recognition technology. The policy positions the technology as a lead-generation tool for active investigations and restricts access to a defined group of investigators.

Under the approved policy, Clearview AI queries may be run only in support of a specific, active investigation. Any match returned by the system must be independently verified through other investigative means before police take any enforcement action based on the identification. The policy is intended to prevent the facial recognition output from being used as the sole basis for detention, arrest, or search.

Access is restricted to detectives and the department’s Criminal Analyst, covering approximately 26 personnel across the Criminal Investigations Division, Special Operations Division, and Gang Intelligence Unit. Access is further limited to cases to which those personnel are actively assigned. The City’s license plate reader system is explicitly separated from the facial recognition capability in the policy and cannot be used to conduct facial recognition searches.

Oversight is structured through the City Manager’s Office and the City Attorney’s Office, which are tasked with reviewing Clearview’s own internal policies against policies adopted by peer cities using the same technology. The measure passed unanimously.

The vote follows comparable municipal adoptions of Clearview AI around the country. Aurora, Colorado’s city council approved a Clearview AI contract in 2025 under similar lead-generation and independent-verification restrictions. Austin, Texas adopted facial recognition in 2025 following a spike in violent crime, and New Orleans delayed a vote on expanded police use of facial recognition earlier this year.

Oklahoma has been an active venue for facial recognition policy debate at the municipal level, though state-level legislation on the technology has not advanced. The Lawton vote gives the city one of the more detailed local-government policy frameworks in the state governing police use of commercial facial recognition tools.

Clearview AI’s product operates by matching query images against its database of publicly scraped images from the open web. The company has argued that lead-generation policies with mandatory independent verification meet the due-process concerns raised by civil liberties groups, while critics argue the underlying database construction remains legally contested in some jurisdictions.

The Lawton policy does not include a specific reporting cadence for quarterly usage disclosures or a retention limit for query logs; those details would need to be added in subsequent policy revisions or departmental procedures.

Sources: KSWO

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By Ali Nassar-Smith