The move was intended to keep out people who had been banned from city buildings. The city proposed and later scrapped a proposal to have the technology at City Hall and City Hall West. The city of Boise experienced a bit of blowback in July 2019 over the use of facial recognition technology in city buildings.
Clearview AI distributed the technology widely and made the tool accessible to many law enforcement agencies free of charge. Buzzfeed's reporting showed that employees using the app without an administrator's knowledge happened often.
Orr said ACSO has no plans to use the software in the future.
Buzzfeed said its data showed that the Sheriff's Office ran 6-10 searches on the app. However, Orr told the Statesman on Tuesday that since the Buzzfeed report was published, the Sheriff's Office learned that a detective ran a demo of the Clearview software to see how it worked, but did not use it in any cases. "At the conclusion of the trial, it was determined that, while the technology proved promising and potentially valuable under certain conditions and applications, the benefits did not outweigh the potential concerns surrounding facial recognition and its use in our community at this time," Williams said.Īda County Sheriff's Office spokesman Patrick Orr initially told Buzzfeed News that the department did not use the technology and had no plans to do so. BPD decided not to use the technology long-term, though Williams said in an email Tuesday that police believed the results were "promising."īuzzfeed reported that Boise police ran between 11 and 50 searches through Clearview AI. Williams said only one person had access to the app.
However, the matches would have taken place between January and June of 2020, when the department was doing a trial of the technology. The Boise Police Department did not indicate when these three instances took place and did not identify the people who were run through Clearview AI's search engine. When the man was taken to the jail, he was identified, and his ID and possible match through Clearview were the same. A photo was taken and run through Clearview AI, which returned a possible match through an Ada County Jail photo on.
In a third instance, a man accused of disorderly conduct refused to give police his name. Williams said police developed other information in the case that identified the suspect. In another instance, police used Clearview AI to match a photo of an assault suspect caught on security camera to an Ada County Jail booking photo from. The technology returned a possible match, and an officer later confirmed it was the same person. In one instance, the department scanned a photo of an elderly woman who was lost and could not remember where she lived. In an email to the Statesman on Tuesday, Williams said there were three cases where the use of Clearview AI led to identifying individuals - all of whom were matched through photos posted on. In Boise, the technology was used in just a handful of cases, according to BPD spokesperson Haley Williams.