Facial recognition back in crime-fighting toolkit for Colorado police

Facial recognition technology is coming back to the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO), this time under a new state law that lays out regulations for the use of facial recognition for policing.

The Sheriff’s department previously deployed FRT with biometrics from Colorado’s Rank One Computing (ROC) to help identify unknown suspects by running them against a bank of images. News reports from ABC Channel 7 in Denver and other sources do not specify when the previous use occurred – only that the police use “stopped after the software provider discontinued the service.”

The software provider in question was LexisNexis, and the service was its Lumen product. A comprehensive draft accountability report on the deployment specifies that the software leveraged an algorithm supplied by multimodal biometrics and computer vision provider ROC Corporation, namely ROC SDK version 2.2.1.

The report looks at issues such as image quality (noting that “the core facial recognition algorithms depend primarily on the image quality of the probe image and candidate images and on the robustness of the algorithm development process) and potential bias in algorithmic facial recognition systems.

It also lays out policy and procedure cornerstones for the continued use of FRT by law enforcement.

“Facial recognition services provide many opportunities for the enhancement of productivity, increased crime solvability, investigative effectiveness, and increased safety for both citizens and members,” the policy statement says. “It is the policy of the Sheriff’s Office to utilize facial recognition services to develop leads of unknown subjects for law enforcement investigations in a manner that safeguards against potential abuses. This policy ensures that the use of facial recognition services by the Sheriff’s Office and its members is consistent with authorized purposes while not violating anyone’s privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.”

ACSO Deputy John Bartmann says the initial use of facial recognition by the department resulted in a number of misunderstandings about what the biometric technology actually is and does. Lumen scans the Colorado Information Sharing Consortium (CISC), a government database of booking photos from law enforcement agencies statewide, to reveal possible matches, which can turn into leads.

Per the accountability report, “Lumen provides multiple results, each with a given accuracy score generated by the ROC SDK’s facial recognition algorithms. The accuracy score is designed to indicate the likelihood of the probe image matching a given result.”

“There’s no social media scraping, no getting photos of the internet or anything like that,” says Bartmann. “These are booking photos done by law enforcement agencies that are part of CISC.”

The ACSO has already held two public meetings to collect feedback on the issue of facial recognition tech, and is hosting a third on September 12 in Denver.

The forthcoming redeployment of facial recognition will bring its own challenges. But by now FRT is old hat for police in Colorado. A 2020 article from the Denver Post notes that the Denver DMV has been fielding requests from law enforcement agencies for FRT searches since at least 2016.

Article Topics

biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  Colorado  |  criminal ID  |  facial recognition  |  regulation  |  ROC