Attorney General TJ Donovan is asking Vermont lawmakers to loosen a ban on police use of facial recognition technology.
The state issued a moratorium on facial recognition software in 2020, as part of a package of police reforms. But the Attorney General’s Office is now asking the Legislature to allow police to use the technology to help them solve child sexual exploitation cases.
Law enforcement officials say the technology makes it easier to search through data stored on electronic devices seized during investigations of child sexual abuse.
“This is technology we’ve been using for years and years and it’s how we used to do business all the time before this moratorium took effect,” Detective Matthew Raymond, commander of Vermont’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, told the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
According to Raymond, the moratorium has “exacerbated” a yearlong backlog of materials police need to examine in child exploitation cases. “In that year of backlog could be hundreds of kids waiting to be saved and we can’t get to them because we can’t use this technology currently,” he said.
Rep. Tom Burditt, R-West Rutland, vice chair of the Judiciary Committee, said that the House imposed a moratorium on facial recognition technology last year because it can be inaccurate and biased. While facial recognition technology can work fairly well to identify white people, it’s less accurate in identifying people of color, he said.
But Burditt said he supports the proposed change because it would allow police to use the technology only to search for pictures of alleged perpetrators or potential victims on devices they’ve already obtained.
“It’s not like they’re on Facebook and just doing a fishing expedition. It’s very narrow,” Burditt said.
Assistant Attorney General David Scherr told the Judiciary Committee Tuesday that granting police this flexibility isn’t giving them more authority than they already have. Police can already obtain a suspect’s electronic devices through a search warrant and look through them manually.
“This is not expanding police power. It’s not allowing officers to do something that they can’t and won’t do now,” Scherr said. “All it’s doing is the very narrow task of speeding up what they are going to do anyway and what they’re lawfully able to do currently.”
The Vermont ACLU has raised concerns about the proposal and wants the bill amended to ensure police can’t use facial recognition technology to identify unknown suspects within a “database or set of images.”
Falko Schilling, the Vermont ACLU’s advocacy director, said facial recognition technologies can be inaccurate, particularly “when they’re used to try to identify people who have darker skin tones, and especially women who have darker skin tones.”
He said that language proposed by the Attorney General’s Office doesn’t seem to prohibit police from using software to try to identify a suspect.
“That raises the concern that misidentification could happen and then start a further investigation and possible arrest into crimes which are extremely, extremely serious,” Schilling said.
“And so we wanted to make sure that this technology is not being used to try and identify people who are not already known,” he said.
Scherr said that police don’t want to use the technology to make a “broad sweep,” but to look for faces of “specific people that we’re concerned about in the investigation.”
Rep. Maxine Grad, D-Moretown, chair of the Judiciary Committee, said legislators plan to add language to the bill reflecting the ACLU’s concern, and prohibit police from using the software to search for unknown suspects.
The Attorney General’s Office also asked lawmakers for permission to use facial recognition technology to investigate certain other crimes that may come to light in a child exploitation case — homicide, sexual assault and kidnapping.
But House lawmakers said they plan to keep the bill narrowly focused on child exploitation cases.
