of the sweet irony department

Back in 2020, Tim Cushing wrote about the Las Vegas Police Department and their practice of running low-resolution images through facial recognition software to generate leads in the course of investigations. While his post focused on how those low-resolution images were being used and sometimes misused, it’s important to recognize for the purposes of this post that the Las Vegas Police Department was not only using facial recognition technology for their purposes, but was using it broadly enough that it wasn’t a narrow, targeted use that only came into play when the circumstances involved very high-quality images. From that original post:

As with everywhere law enforcement uses this technology, low-quality input images are common. Investigating crimes means relying on security camera footage, which uses far less powerful cameras than the multi-megapixel cameras found on everyone’s phone. The Las Vegas Metro Police Department relied on low-quality images for many of its facial recognition searches, according to documents obtained by Motherboard.

So if you were wondering what the Las Vegas Police Department thinks about using facial recognition technology, you have your answer: it’s all bait as far as the police are concerned. That is, it seems, until the cameras are turned on those same cops.

The NFL rolled out a new accreditation program this year for its staff at NFL stadiums across the country. As part of the new program, the NFL is requesting a variety of biometric data from everyone who will be working games, including fingerprints and facial scans for facial recognition purposes, along with other identifying information like a home address and phone number.

Despite the fact that this technology is widely used by Las Vegas police, Steve Grammas, president of the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, is calling on police officers to refuse to act as security at these NFL games.

“They’re going to take your biometrics — your face — and they’re going to use that however they need to,” Grammas says, apparently oblivious to the irony of the argument on behalf of police forces, which are embracing facial recognition at an astonishing rate worldwide, that collecting biometrics is invasive. Las Vegas Police Department Captain Dori Koren told MIT Technology Review in 2020 that police were already using facial recognition.

“They’re going to expand that to their NFL family affiliates to use your information if they need to. That branches out to a lot of places where your biometric data could be exposed, a lot of people you might not want exposed.” Grammas says it raises fears that biometric data — say, a selfie — could end up in the hands of “people who are anti-police, who support an agenda other than law and order.”

Somehow I think there are other concerns about how that biometric is used. You know, maybe there’s a concern that the data might fall into the wrong hands, particularly hands that are interested in matching the faces of police officers with public appearances of notorious groups that exist. Groups that tend to be fascist, or that spread messages of white supremacy, or other political affiliations that these same police don’t want to be seen as. Maybe they could be matched with attendees of certain rallies, for example, or with attendees of convention “tours” like the one that happened on January 6th.

But whatever the reason, neither Grammas nor the police department that supported Grammas’s concerns have bothered to explain why this technology is appropriate for use by police against the public, but not okay if the camera is pointed at a police officer who is not on duty.

So I think that revenue stream for NFL games is going to disappear for the off-duty Vegas cops. All because they refuse to live in the same world as the rest of us.

Posted under: facial recognition, football games, Las Vegas, Las Vegas PD, privacy

Companies: nfl