Mexican state selects SAFR live facial recognition to ID missing persons, suspects

A pilot of live facial recognition has begun in the Mexican state of Michoacán using technology from SAFR to identify individuals who have been reported missing or for whom the police have an arrest warrant.

Cameras are being deployed to both rural and urban areas, as well as roads around the state. They will be connected to the State Center for Command, Communications, Computing, Control, Coordination and Intelligence (C5), which manages the biometrics function.

The system connects the federal Office of the Attorney General, the state prosecutor and private security systems operated by Oxxo (Latin America’s largest convenience store chain) and banks.

The government claims the system is 99.87 percent accurate.

There are 319 subjects load into the reference database so far, including missing persons, according to an announcement from the state government.

The legal framework for cooperation between different security agencies is part of the National System of Investigation and Intelligence in Public Security Law approved  by legislators in July.

Pepe Flores, acting director of Mexican digital human rights organization R3D, told organized crime analysis organization InSight Crime that the country’s introduction of facial recognition to fight crime follows “US-inspired security models based on identification and recognition, the normalization of indiscriminate mass surveillance, and now access to retained data.”

Mexico has been grappling with how to find missing and abducted individuals for some time, and has mooted integrating the biometrics records of the CURP national identity system with the National Registry of Missing and Unlocated Persons. The whole biometric national ID system has been put on hold for now, however, in several states, by court injunctions related to data privacy concerns.

The country has also shown a greater appetite for (or tolerance of) real-time facial recognition, with Vsblty technology running on feeds from thousands of cameras in Mexico City and credited with contributing to a 48 percent reduction in high-impact crimes in the Benito Jaurez district.

Article Topics

biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  live facial recognition  |  Mexico  |  missing persons  |  procurement  |  real-time biometrics  |  SAFR