Over the protests of some citizens, the Cobb Board of Commissioners on Tuesday approved a contract for Cobb Police to use facial recognition technology for criminal investigations.
The department has been part of a complimentary pilot program with Clearview AI, one of the leading facial recognition platforms. The three-year contract comes with a cost of $17,995 a year.
During a lengthy and often impassioned presentation, Cobb Police Chief Stuart VanHoozer said the Clearview algorithm is ranked the best in the industry, and that he and his staff have been meeting with commissioners and members of the community to develop a draft policy to guide how the technology will be used.
VanHoozer repeatedly defended Clearview AI, which is used by more than 3,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide.
The platform uses artificial intelligence to find online photos from publicly available sources to find matches of criminal suspects. VanHoozer said the Cobb Police policy for using Clearview AI has taken long to develop due to concerns about how it might be used.
“There are some large misconceptions about this product and our intent,” VanHoozer said during the presentation (you can watch it in its entirety below). “I’d be happy to speak with those have been speaking up on this subject” because some of the information, he added “is inaccurate.”
One of the citizens opposed to the contract is Robin Moody of East Cobb, who mentioned during a public comment period before VanHoozer’s presentation the fines and other penalties racked up by Clearview AI for privacy rights violations in Europe, including collecting images of the faces of people without their consent.
She also said that AI hasn’t eased concerns about racial profiling.
Another citizen, during the same public comment period, said that “I don’t give you permission to use my face.”
VanHoozer said Cobb will not use Clearview AI to scan people in crowds or at public gatherings, and use of the technology will be limited to authorized investigators who must log in and provide a case number.
He said Clearview AI is just another tool to help police investigate possible suspects in crimes, and nothing more.
“Emerging technology often collides with privacy concerns,” he said. “Sometimes it takes some time to work those things out.”
But the value of the technology to Cobb Police during the pilot program has been invaluable, he said.
The Clearview AI tool helped police identify a cold-case homicide suspect and also identified the ringleader of a violent home invasion that included children being kidnapped, among other investigations.
VanHoozer said that his department governs itself with an “even stricter policy” so that citizen concerns “are strongly mitigated.”
He said Clearview AI does not do broad public surveillance, such as at public meetings and sporting events, nor does it take footage from doorbell cameras and streetlights.
“What this product does for the most part is take a photograph of a known offender and compare that to a database that has images that are legally obtained and publicly available so that we can identify that individual,” VanHoozer said.
He said the effort to craft the policy and to educate the public about how Clearview AI will be used has been complicated by what he said is information that’s “consistently” being reported incorrectly in the news media.
“We get that nobody wants to live in a police state, including me,” he said. “We would not ever do the things that have been alleged here today. I feel strongly that this is the right thing to do.”
Related:
- Suspect in murders of Cobb sheriff’s deputies gets life sentence
- Two women identified as suspects in Canton Road car fire
- Smyrna murder suspect arrested in Delk-Powers Ferry area
- East Cobb woman indicted for her mother’s strangulation death
- Suspect arrested at Roswell Road apartment after police standoff
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