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Surveillance Cameras
Surveillance Cameras
Most of us care deeply about protecting the rights of Milwaukee residents and standing up to the plight of racism and anti-immigrant feelings and policies that are plaguing our city.
But let’s call the danger out immediately, the Milwaukee Police Department is seeking to purchase Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) to use on the residents of Milwaukee. This is terrible. It is incredibly dangerous and a bad step backwards into racial profiling, over policing and unnecessary surveillance of our people. In fact, let me be more clear: they are seeking to obtain a new license to use Facial Recognition Technology software, but they have already been borrowing this technology to use on Milwaukeeans, without even telling us.
I don’t want to bury the lede on this article: The Milwaukee Police Department should not be able to buy and use Facial Recognition Technology on Milwaukee residents. Its use nationally and internationally is always racist and anti-immigrant in application and will be compromised and manipulated by our federal government. There are no Standardized Operating Procedures (SOPs), best practices or guard rails that we, or the police can set up to prevent this, even if we were to assume the best of intentions. This will happen whether they purchase this technology or continue to use the FRT technology they have access to via other sources. Anyone who is concerned about this needs to pressure the common council and the mayor to prevent the use of Facial Recognition Technology. It is far too dangerous in this federal landscape where the feds have made it clear that they can and will get unfettered and unprecedented access into every corner of our private lives. The risks far outweigh the benefits.
Now for some context.
On April 17, The Milwaukee Police Department made a public presentation at the Fire and Police Commission, where I and 28 other people testified against FRT.
Digital Security?
I have many years of experience monitoring government use of surveillance and technologies and have taught digital safety and security for decades, both here and in New York City. I also formerly served on Governor Evers’ Data Privacy and Security Advisory Committee, and have been attending Fire and Police Commission and common council meetings as a member of the public since 2006.
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I can’t warn you against this technology strongly enough.
In its implementation and usage is racist and abusive in addition to being another steppingstone to constant government surveillance. Police in China, Russia and Israel have been using it and have now upgraded to FRT linked body cams that use AI to constantly monitor all people and upload footage to be searched and scanned by their federal governments. In China and Russia, it is used to monitor political dissidents and foreign-born people. North Koreans in China are forced to upload daily selfies to help prevent them from emigrating to South Korea. Uyghurs in China are monitored with FRT and put in detention camps. This is supplemented by monitoring their social media accounts, something that our federal government and fusion centers already do.
Given the state of affairs in the United States today, it is no longer far-fetched to think that the federal government won’t attempt to do something similar to immigrants here.
Milwaukee Surveillance City
Milwaukeeans are more heavily surveilled today than ever before. City and private owned cameras recording the public - drones, license plate readers, cell site simulators, FLOCK cameras, social media surveillance and fusion centers are operating at all new levels, and you’d be hard pressed to find areas not covered by this technology web. It is integrated and easily accessible by federal law enforcement agencies like ICE. This is mass surveillance. It does not deter crime.
In April, at least 1,300 college students had their visas revoked by the Trump administration for no justifiable reasons. At least 13 at UWM, 10 at Concordia, others from Marquette and MATC and over two dozen from UW Madison alone.
These students are our neighbors and children. My children, neighbors and friends go to these schools. Seemingly, the federal government is monitoring social media and using facial recognition to punish them for expressing their opinions—expression formerly protected by the first amendment. Deportable offenses included linking these students to paid parking tickets, speeding tickets and other resolved misdemeanors, if any reason was given at all. ICE is already in our courthouse. The fear in the immigrant community grows daily. The confusion is so strong that schools, universities and even the City of Milwaukee’s website hosts immigration resources from the Turners, Voces de la Frontera and others because of these threats.
I no longer have faith in the division and firewalls between local control and federal government access to otherwise secure information. This includes our fusion centers, of course, and the expanded reach of fusion centers such as we see in the Fiserv Forum and other businesses that were included as part of federal investments in surveillance systems as a result of the DNC and RNC. Fusion Centers are Joint Terrorism Task Forces, that is, joint federal-state law enforcement intelligence hubs with a long history of investigating, collecting, and disseminating information on protestors and communities of color, but the public has little information about how these entities work and their impact on our rights. We certainly don’t have oversight.
Spying on Us
The federal government has long exploited Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to use locally gathered surveillance on U.S. citizens. And we have all seen the violent way that DOGE’s very recent access of previously private information regarding the IRS and ICE is being used. The federal government is not doing anything to stop this. In fact, they are encouraging it. It’s so decentralized now, that we only seem to have local opportunities to protect ourselves. The creepy and insidious way that ICE and other groups can tap into local surveillance is so decentralized that it is almost beyond accountability.
The rule of law is eroding, and the unfettered use of technology is accelerating this, regardless of the intentions of local officers and staff. We need immediate safeguards.
The MPD’s presentation on FRT indicated that the Milwaukee Police Department is already using facial recognition technology in some capacity. And in line with the significant racial disparities that have led to false identifications, false arrests and lawsuits in other cities, each example in the MPD’s report was a Black man. This technology is being used disproportionately on Black faces, even though there are clear concerns about the accuracy of facial recognition on people of color. We know that MPD is using facial recognition technology on our children’s faces, and they want to trade 2.5 million “jail records”—which are human faces of members of our community—in exchange for new facial recognition licensing.
So what does that mean? FBI data show 26,788 arrests in Milwaukee County during 2023 (which is down from 36k+ pre-2020). After arrest, an individual is referred to the DA’s office for prosecution. Between 2020 and 2022, only 42% of referrals resulted in charges. After charges are filed, only 2/3 result in conviction. The other 1/3 are dismissed or deferred.
Biometric Injustice
So if we start with 26,000 arrests in a year, we should expect about 11,000 charges, and about 7,200 convictions. In other words, we should expect only one in four arrests to result in conviction. That means that approximately 1,875,000 of these photos are of innocent people—people who were not convicted of a crime. And they’re being traded for a one-year site license only. That means each Milwaukee person’s biometric data is worth .004 cents to this company.
The case studies presented were cases that MPD themselves admitted were solvable without the use of facial recognition technology. The risk and collateral damage of using this technology clearly outweighs the reward. The use of this technology—coupled with the millions invested in these systems already—has chilling effects on first and fourth amendment rights and devastating effects on our society. If the federal government is already revoking visa statuses, how soon until scholarships, probation status, and other things are used to extort compliance and silence? We have just heard President Trump tell Salvadoreño dictator Bukele that they need more offshore prisons for “homegrown criminals next.”
The City of Milwaukee needs to ban the use of facial recognition technology like Madison, San Francisco, Boston, Portland and many other cities have.
Our Identities, Our Lives
It is clear that law enforcement does not have the understanding and protections in place regardless of the SOPs that they anticipate writing. The federal government will almost immediately have access to all of this data and the MPD has offered to trade the data and information for many thousands of Milwaukeeans in the database to Biometrica, whose parent company MorphoTrust USA is owned and controlled by the Safran Group—a foreign aerospace, weapons and technology company, who was already fined for $17.2 million by the United States DOJ for bribing Chinese officials for contracts. This is not acceptable. Our families’ identities and biometrics must be protected and not traded as a commodity. Once these systems are in place local law enforcement and the Common Council will no longer have any protections for how this information is used by the federal government or the foreign companies who will have access to this.
National evidence shows that when police rely on face-matching software the error rate is far from theoretical: it has already produced a string of wrongful arrests, all involving Black residents, and each example underscores why city officials must slow down, study the data, and establish strong safeguards before deployment.
In Detroit, Robert Williams was handcuffed in front of his children and jailed overnight after software mis-tagged him in a blurry shop camera still; the city settled his federal lawsuit in 2024, agreeing to require corroborating evidence for any future arrests based on a “match.” And we learned this week that even though New Orleans has this procedure already, the police there did not adhere to those rules. It was too easy for them to just rely on the technology regardless of the law or the racialized inaccuracies. Their cameras were scanning faces in real time and sending alerts to officers’ phones without any oversight or knowledge by the city government or public, showing that the police don’t even follow the rules.
Faulty Algorithims
Two other Detroiters—Michael Oliver and eight-months-pregnant Porcha Woodruff—were also swept up by faulty algorithms; Woodruff’s case made her the sixth Black Detroiter misidentified since 2019. In New Jersey, resident Nijeer Parks spent ten days in jail and thousands in legal fees, after police trusted an erroneous face hit rather than a solid alibi.
These incidents are not anomalies: a 2023 Detroit Police log shows the department still runs roughly 125 facial recognition searches each year, the vast majority on Black men.
Peer-reviewed research explains why these misfires cluster on darker faces. MIT’s landmark Gender Shades audit found commercial gender-classification tools erred on darker-skinned women up to 34.7 percent of the time versus 0.8 percent for light-skinned men.
A comprehensive 2019 U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology study covering 189 algorithms reported false-positive rates up to 100 times higher for West-African faces than for European faces. The Government Accountability Office’s latest review of federal law-enforcement use warns that most agencies still have no formal process for measuring racial-bias or civil-liberty risks. Some algorithms falsely matched Black and Asian faces ten to one hundred times more often than white ones. That is exactly what we will be getting here.
Given the documented harms and the unresolved accuracy gaps, Milwaukee should—at minimum—adopt the ACLU of Wisconsin’s call for a two-year moratorium, pass an ordinance requiring transparency, community input and an affirmative common council vote on any new technology, create a community tech-advisory board, and require robust third-party audits before any live deployment.
Avoidable Risk
Until the common council and the mayor commit to that rigor, entrusting facial-recognition to routine policing is not public safety; it is an avoidable risk that history shows will fall hardest on Black Milwaukeeans.
Finally, consider that the MPD report indicated that the ACLU and NAACP endorsed Biometrica’s use of this technology. That was not true. Consider that their report indicated the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department used Biometrica’s FRT to secure 48 of 50 convictions where they used the tech. That was not true. The county supervisors who spoke with the sheriff’s office about this found that MCSO had never used this technology.
There is no SOP that can be written that will prevent racist algorithms from working the way they do. There is no MPD-created rule that will prevent the federal government and these foreign weapons manufacturers from having access to our biometric data. The city government and the mayor are our only protection from all of this.
To allow the use of this technology, to sell and trade our most personal data, jeopardizes all of our families.
Please do everything you can to prevent law enforcement from using Facial Recognition Technology. At this moment in history, it is simply too dangerous. It is dangerous for Black youth in our city, who are already overpoliced. It is dangerous for people seeking reproductive health care who will be tracked and recorded as they are doing in Texas. It is dangerous for our trans families seeking healthcare. It is dangerous for immigrants and mixed-status families who are going to school and work and run the risk of being detained and deported with their children left unattended on the street like the 12-year-old boy in Massachusetts the other week.
Please let your friends, neighbors and city leadership know how you feel about this invasive surveillance of our lives. Give them a call. I’m sure they’d love to hear from you.
