Face recognition technology in the hands of police is dangerous. Police departments across the country frequently use the technology to try to identify images of unknown suspects by comparing them to large photo databases, but it often fails to generate a correct match. And numerous studies have shown that face recognition technology misidentifies Black people and other people of color at higher rates than white people. To date, there have been at least seven wrongful arrests we know of in the United States due to police reliance on incorrect face recognition results — and those are just the known cases. In nearly every one of those instances, the person wrongfully arrested was Black.

Supporters of police using face recognition technology often portray these failures as unfortunate mistakes that are unlikely to recur. Yet, they keep coming. Last year, six Detroit police officers showed up at the doorstep of an eight-months pregnant woman and wrongfully arrested her in front of her children for a carjacking that she could not plausibly have committed. A month later, the prosecutor dismissed the case against her.

I Did Nothing Wrong. I Was Arrested Anyway.

Over a year after a police face recognition tool matched me to a crime I did not commit, my family still feels the impact. We must stop this...

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

Police departments should be doing everything in their power to avoid wrongful arrests, which can turn people’s lives upside down and result in loss of work, inability to care for children, and other harmful consequences. So, what’s behind these repeated failures? As the ACLU explained in a recent submission to the federal government, there are multiple ways in which police use of face recognition technology goes wrong. Perhaps most glaring is that the most widely adopted police policy designed to avoid false arrests in this context simply does not work. Records from the wrongful arrest cases demonstrate why.

It has become standard practice among police departments and companies making this technology to warn officers that a result from a face recognition search does not constitute a positive identification of a suspect, and that additional investigation is necessary to develop the probable cause needed to obtain an arrest warrant. For example, the International Association of Chiefs of Police cautions that a face recognition search result is “a strong clue, and nothing more, which must then be corroborated against other facts and investigative findings before a person can be determined to be the subject whose identity is being sought.” The Detroit Police Department’s face recognition technology policy adopted in September 2019 similarly states that a face recognition search result is only an “an investigative lead and IS NOT TO BE CONSIDERED A POSITIVE IDENTIFICATION OF ANY SUBJECT. Any possible connection or involvement of any subject to the investigation must be determined through further investigation and investigative resources.”

Police departments across the country, from Los Angeles County to the Indiana State Police, to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, provide similar warnings. However ubiquitous, these warnings have failed to prevent harm.

We’ve seen police treat the face recognition result as a positive identification, ignoring or not understanding the warnings that face recognition technology is simply not reliable enough to provide a positive identification.

In Louisiana, for example, police relied solely on an incorrect face recognition search result from Clearview AI as purported probable cause for an arrest warrant. The officers did this even though the law enforcement agency signed a contract with the face recognition company acknowledging officers “must conduct further research in order to verify identities or other data generated by the [Clearview] system.” That overreliance led to Randal Quran Reid, a Georgia resident who had never even been to Louisiana, being wrongfully arrested for a crime he couldn’t have committed and held for nearly a week in jail.

In an Indiana investigation, police similarly obtained an arrest warrant based only upon an assertion that the detective “viewed the footage and utilized the Clearview AI software to positively identify the female suspect.” No additional confirmatory investigation was conducted.

But even when police do conduct additional investigative steps, those steps often exacerbate and compound the unreliability of face recognition searches. This is a particular problem when police move directly from a facial recognition result to a witness identification procedure, such as a photographic lineup.

Face recognition technology is designed to generate a list of faces that are similar to the suspect’s image, but often will not actually be a match. When police think they have a match, they frequently ask a witness who saw the suspect to view a photo lineup consisting of the image derived from the face recognition search, plus five “filler” photos of other people. Photo lineups have long been known to carry a high risk of misidentification. The addition of face recognition-generated images only makes it worse. Because the face recognition-generated image is likely to appear more similar to the suspect than the filler photos, there is a heightened chance that a witness will mistakenly choose that image out of the lineup, even though it is not a true match.

This problem has contributed to known cases of wrongful arrests, including the arrests of Porcha Woodruff, Michael Oliver, and Robert Williams by Detroit police (the ACLU represents Mr. Williams in a wrongful arrest lawsuit). In these cases, police obtained an arrest warrant based solely on the combination of a false match from face recognition technology; and a false identification from a witness viewing a photo lineup that was constructed around the face recognition lead and five filler photos. Each of the witnesses chose the face recognition-derived false match, instead of deciding that the suspect did not, in fact, appear in the lineup.

A lawsuit filed earlier this year in Texas alleges that a similar series of failures led to the wrongful arrest of Harvey Eugene Murphy Jr. by Houston police. And in New Jersey, police wrongfully arrested Nijeer Parks in 2019 after face recognition technology incorrectly flagged him as a likely match to a shoplifting suspect. An officer who had seen the suspect (before he fled) viewed the face recognition result, and said he thought it matched his memory of the suspect’s face.

After the Detroit Police Department’s third wrongful arrest from face recognition technology became public last year, Detroit’s chief of police acknowledged the problem of erroneous face recognition results tainting subsequent witness identifications. He explained that by moving straight from face recognition result to lineup, “it is possible to taint the photo lineup by presenting a person who looks most like the suspect” but is not in fact the suspect. The Department’s policy, merely telling police that they should conduct “further investigation,” had not stopped police from engaging in this bad practice.

Because police have repeatedly proved unable or unwilling to follow face recognition searches with adequate independent investigation, police access to the technology must be strictly curtailed — and the best way to do this is through strong bans. More than 20 jurisdictions across the country, from Boston, to Pittsburgh, to San Francisco, have done just that, barring police from using this dangerous technology.

Boilerplate warnings have proven ineffective. Whether these warnings fail because of human cognitive bias toward trusting computer outputs, poor police training, incentives to quickly close cases, implicit racism, lack of consequences, the fallibility of witness identifications, or other factors, we don’t know. But if the experience of known wrongful arrests teaches us anything, it is that such warnings are woefully inadequate to protect against abuse.

The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in Idaho v. United States and Moyle v. United States, which will determine whether politicians can put doctors in jail for treating pregnant patients experiencing medical emergencies. The ultimate decision in the case — which is expected by the summer — could have severe consequences on the health and lives of people across the country facing emergency pregnancy complications. Here’s what you need to know:

Anti-abortion politicians brought this case all the way up to the Supreme Court to deny pregnant people access to emergency abortion care that is necessary to prevent severe and potentially life-altering health consequences, and even death. A federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act or EMTALA, has long guaranteed that, in an emergency, patients can get the care they need — including abortion care — regardless of where they live. This is not a Democrat or Republican issue: Every administration from President Reagan to President Biden has recognized that EMTALA requires emergency abortion care. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade did not diminish these longstanding federal protections, which override state laws that would prohibit such care, but now, extreme politicians are doing everything in their power to prevent someone experiencing emergency pregnancy complications from getting care in emergency rooms.

While it considers the case, the Supreme Court has already allowed Idaho politicians to block emergency care for pregnant people using the state’s abortion ban which has no exception for health, and the impact is already reverberating across the state. For example, St. Luke’s Health System, the largest health system in Idaho, which sees hundreds of thousands of emergency department visits each year, reports that they are now transferring pregnant patients with medical emergencies out of state to get the care they need, but even that delay can also increase the unacceptable risks patients face. Not surprisingly, doctors do not want to practice in a state where they are criminalized for providing the emergency care their patients need: Since Idaho’s extreme abortion ban took effect, more than 20 percent of obstetricians in Idaho have left the state, according to a report published by the Idaho Coalition for Safe Healthcare.

If the Supreme Court sides with Idaho in this case, these devastating effects on patients and doctors alike could spread to other states with extreme abortion bans, such as Arizona, and would give anti-abortion politicians around the country the green light to try to prohibit this essential, even life-saving, emergency care.

The issues in this case are about hospitals and physicians who want to fulfill their oath and provide care to patients experiencing medical emergencies, but politicians want to enforce Idaho’s abortion ban up until the moment that a pregnant person’s life is at imminent risk. “Can I continue to replace her blood loss fast enough? How many organ systems must be failing? Can a patient be hours away from death before I intervene, or does it have to be minutes?”

In Alabama, Embryos Are People and It Won't Stop There

In Alabama, Embryos Are People and It Won't Stop There

On February 16, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children under state law, meaning the embryo has rights consistent with a person living in the United States. While this marks the first time a frozen embryo has been granted ...

On February 16, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children under state law, meaning the embryo has rights consistent with a person living in the United States. While this marks the first time a frozen embryo has been granted ...

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These are some of the questions our client Dr. Caitlin Gustafson shared that some Idaho providers are now forced to consider when a patient comes in with an emergency pregnancy complication in a recent op-ed on the case. Politics shouldn’t matter when you’re trying to treat a patient whose condition is rapidly deteriorating before your very eyes, but that’s the exact dystopia politicians are trying to force on all of us.

Overturning Roe v. Wade was just the beginning. Anti-abortion politicians are using every tool at their disposal in their campaign to ban abortion nationwide, and they won’t stop there. They are also pushing a legal strategy to give rights to embryos and fetuses that would override the rights of the pregnant person. We saw what happened in Alabama when the state supreme court granted rights to embryos, which forced IVF clinics across the state to temporarily shut down services. To be clear: There isn’t a serious argument to use EMTALA to grant legal rights to embryos, but that may not stop justices from considering whether to follow the lead of the anti-abortion movement and issue another devastating blow to people’s power to make personal medical decisions during pregnancy.

Anti-abortion politicians and the groups supporting them are trying to use the courts to further their agenda because the policies they’re pushing are deeply unpopular. Every time abortion is on the ballot, voters send a clear message that they want reproductive freedom to be protected. That’s why the anti-abortion movement has turned to the courts to carry out their agenda, and the scary thing is they might just be successful.

While there is already federal law to protect access to emergency care, the way anti-abortion politicians are trying to manipulate their state’s ban to deny people emergency care shows why we need to put an end to state bans once and for all. We need Congress to pass federal protections for abortion rights that will end extreme bans in states and protect access to care nationwide.

Right now, efforts to censor college protestors, to ban diverse materials in schools and to silence students and staff threaten our right to free speech in schools. People are having their voices silenced, their right to learn challenged, and their access to information restricted. But how can we navigate these complex issues with the next generation?

We at the ACLU created a series of comic stories with illustrative journalist Eda Uzunlar to empower students and educators, spark vital conversations about their rights, and ensure all voices are heard and clear, both in the classroom and beyond. Our first installment illustrates the story of Anthony Crawford who is a public school teacher and part of a lawsuit challenging HB 1775, Oklahoma’s classroom censorship law.

In this Q&A, we sat down with Eda to discuss why comics are the perfect medium to tackle these issues and connect with young people in a way that resonates far more effectively than traditional media can.

Let’s start with your journey as an illustrative journalist, comic creator, and audio enthusiast. What inspired you to use this kind of medium for your work?

I’ve been making comics since childhood. Like most kids, I doodled, and eventually, my doodles turned into my first comic. It was about a character called Spaceman – creative, I know – an astronaut stranded on the moon. He was this sardonic, really sarcastic, figure. It was a simple concept. He became this kind of vessel for expressing myself as a young person, particularly growing up in South Dakota with my family being both Muslim and immigrants from Turkey. Expressing these issues in a way that people who were very different from me would understand was crucial to me.

I realized that comics are a way to discuss complex stories without oversimplifying them. But I never imagined it would become a career. Similarly, my entry into journalism was unexpected. Someone introduced me to FM radio in my teens. Within a year, community radio became this amazing space for me where I hosted a show discussing anything, from civil disobedience to whether or not respect is implied or earned – things I thought people from any background could weigh in on. And I don’t know why they gave a 16-year-old the ability to take live calls, but I got to talk to so many people in my community that way. It felt like a continuation of my comics — anonymous conversations driven by passion rather than preconceived notions based on appearances.

So I took those experiences and turned them into what I do now. I try to help people tell their stories – no matter how complex – in an accessible way, so others can gain understanding of perspectives they might not have known about before.

It’s so great how you’ve integrated your childhood passion for comics with your later pursuits in journalism and radio. You mentioned that comics offer a unique way to discuss complex issues without oversimplifying them. How do you navigate that balance between accessibility and depth when creating your comic content?

It’s all about breaking down big ideas into something digestible and engaging. When stories like these are presented in a visual format, it helps the audience both process and retain what they’re taking in. This especially applies to younger people. They’re the ones making use of social media and watching YouTube to learn about the world around them. Traditional newspapers? Not so much for them. And when we’re talking about accessibility, it’s a big deal. There’s a direct correlation between marginalized groups and limited access to media literacy. Traditional long-form journalism often fails to reach these communities.

Take, for instance, the whole debate around critical race theory (CRT) in Oklahoma. A long-winded article might not reach the people who need to hear about it most. But with comics, we’re able to package up those complex ideas into something that will catch your eye and is easy to grasp. It’s like delivering a message directly to their social media feed. By making these reported stories visually engaging and using everyday language, we’re making sure that everyone gets a chance to join the conversation, especially those who might feel left out by traditional media channels, especially the ones with a paywall.

Let’s talk about this first comic you worked on about Anthony Crawford, an Oklahoma teacher who is part of a lawsuit challenging a classroom censorship bill. How did your approach to brainstorming and initial sketches contribute to capturing his story, particularly in conveying the depth of Black history and the importance of including both student and teacher perspectives?

There’s a process where you try very hard not to limit yourself at the beginning. That’s where you do quick sketches of one panel ten times, trying anything that might be cool to represent the idea. For example, for the panel about Black history being filled with wisdom, not just difficulty, there are a thousand ways to approach it. That could be represented literally with historical figures, or the opposite, which is what I did – a tree. A really big, grand tree. On its own, it could mean anything. But with the context and few words in the panel, it suggests a huge heritage and lineage. Trees are generational, lasting hundreds or even thousands of years. I had about five ideas, and then I saw how the tree looked. The detail and grandeur of this single image helped convey the depth to which Anthony described the importance of Black history in America, aligning with the voice he gave it throughout the piece. That’s another thing – I went back and said, “Listen, there’s just a tree in this panel, but it’s based on how you talked about what Black history feels like to you.” Like history existed before we were here and after we’re gone, just like a tree. And he was like, “That’s perfect.”

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With critical race theory and book bans, everyone loses. The teacher, the student, the whole community is affected when our right to learn and right to free speech are stifled. So we really wanted to get both the student and teacher perspectives. Anthony opened his own story as a teenage version of himself in the early 2000s, enraged because he wasn’t being taught his own community’s history, discussing his experience as a student, which served as an ideal starting point for the piece. Eventually, he transitions into the current day, where he’s facing the same problem – only now, he’s the teacher. And there’s this vague law in Oklahoma that makes it hard for him to teach that same history, and the history of other oppressed communities in America. This shift illustrates the cyclical nature of issues like CRT and book bans in Oklahoma, highlighting how such restrictions on free speech persist over time. The initial depiction of Anthony as an unhappy student parallels the final panel where he faces his own students, who are motivated to learn because they can actually see themselves in their histories.

From Anthony’s perspective as a teacher, the issue of critical race theory getting banned is represented as one that educators like him are worried about. How did you make sure that struggle spoke to the younger audience as well?

When students face dilemmas like seeing banned books in their libraries and the removal of celebrated authors of color from their curriculum, it can shake their confidence in their education and understanding of history. That’s the first part of the comic, and allows young people to make connections with the younger version of Anthony. Then, the narrative zeroes in on the educator perspective. Anthony champions diverse perspectives in his classroom. Through his actions, the comic reveals Anthony’s motivations for teaching, emphasizing his dedication to his students and his younger self. That’s where I wanted students to connect to the teacher side of the comic – so they know that if their right to an inclusive education is stifled, even if none of their own teachers have taken steps to continue teaching about America’s diverse history, there are educators out there who care and are making a difference. My hope is that by seeing someone who was once in their shoes assert his First Amendment rights, current students feel empowered to do the same for themselves.

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In fact, I have seen my comics be used as a connection between students and teachers. I put out a comic about juvenile justice, and about a year later, a teacher from Wyoming reached out to me on Facebook and shared that one of their students shared my comic with them. Next thing you know, they’re teaching it in their classes, sparking discussions on juvenile justice, and showing students how to navigate tough situations. It’s pretty amazing, right? Shows how comics can really make a difference in the real world by influencing education and promoting meaningful dialogue.