This Site Unmasks Cops With Facial Recognition

Our Take

404 Media's Emanuel and Joseph dig into FuckLAPD.com, a site that runs facial recognition against footage of police to spit out an officer's name and salary — and its creator has now built a companion tool for ICE. It's a provocative bit of jiu-jitsu: the same tech that departments use to track us, pointed back at badges. Whatever you think of the legality or ethics of that specific tool, it lands because it exposes a double standard we talk about constantly — the public is expected to accept constant identification by license plate readers and face scans, while the agencies deploying that tech fight tooth and nail to stay anonymous and unaccountable.

That asymmetry is exactly why Flock Safety's ALPR network matters. These cameras log your plate, your location, your patterns, and feed it into databases shared across agencies and states with little transparency about who's looking, why, or how long it's kept. A website that identifies cops is a one-off stunt; a nationwide grid of always-on readers quietly cataloging every driver is the real infrastructure of mass surveillance, and it doesn't need a face to work.

Credit to 404 Media for surfacing this — it's the kind of story that should make people ask harder questions about consent and accountability on both sides of the camera. If you want to see how much of that infrastructure is already sitting in your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete next steps.