COMMAND Q&A A The Growing Use of Facial Recognition By Paul Peluso We started using Clearview AI in late 2019. At the time, Clearview AI was giving trial accounts to anybody with a law enforcement agency email address. We realized we had about 60 officers and detectives who had these trial accounts, and we really didn’t know what they were doing. We decided to narrow that down to the dozen or so How does facial recognition detectives and crime analysts that work out of our Real assist with investigations? Time Crime Center. We gave them about two hours’ worth Video evidence has become ubiquitous in all types of crimes of training on what the new dos and don’ts of our facial rec-we investigate. We averaged about 14-15% clearance for Part ognition policy would be. Then we did a 30-minute online I crimes over the past 20 years. For the past 3 years, where training session for all of the other members of our depart-we’ve gone all-in on facial recognition, our clearance rates ment. We felt that by restricting that access and requiring have not been below 16%. I attribute about a full that anybody who needed somebody to be run percentage point to facial recognition technology. through any of our facial recognition platforms, by requiring those officers and detectives to email How did the Miami PD craft its policy? our Real Time Crime Center with the image that We reached out to as many stakeholders as we they needed scanned, with the case number, with could. We started with representatives from the the type of crime they are investigating, and just ACLU in Miami, knowing that they would not be those details, would obviously just restrict the use Assistant Chief in favor of this technology. All of their concerns of this technology to official business only. Armando Aguilar were very valid, and we were able to incorporate Miami Police Department What have some of the benefits been? most of them. We made sure that we treated a We’ve just had some great success stories on cases match as a tip that is called into CrimeStoppers. that we either would never had solved or cases that would It’s up to the detective to go out and investigate the case. have taken us a lot longer to solve. One case that occurred Another one was to include all of the search results in the this year, it was a murder and we had an eyewitness who investigator’s case file. We conducted media interviews, was very cooperative. The witness saw a suspect shoot we got our state attorney’s office and elected leadership on a victim and was upfront with the detectives and said, board, and then we elicited public feedback through town “Listen, I know this guy, I don’t know his real name, but I halls. Once people heard what we wanted to do, the com-follow him on Instagram.” That witness was in our homi-ments and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. cide office being interviewed and we were able to use this How important is it to include public input? technology to go to that person’s Instagram account, pull We learned from a lot of lessons other agencies learned. the picture off of Instagram, which then yielded a match We weren’t the first to roll out this technology, but we were that got us his real name, we were then able to put him in the first to do what we did as far as getting that public a photo lineup and present it to the eyewitness. Within 24 feedback. Whenever you’re going to roll out any type of hours, that suspect was in custody. We took care of every-technology that has these type of privacy implications and thing within a couple of hours, and were able to bring this has raised a lot of concerns in either media coverage or has person into custody the following day without incident. that potential because it’s kind of new and unknown, you’re Listen to the full interview at officer.com/21293928 better off just being open with the people who you serve. OFFICER MAGAZINE JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023 Officer.com ssistant Chief Armando Aguilar, who heads the Miami Police Department’s Criminal Investigations Division, spoke to OFFICER Magazine about the steps agencies need to take before using facial recognition technology. This interview is edited for clarity and length. How were Miami Police personnel trained? 50 ID 150583225 © Denisismagilov | Dreamstime.com