How #Police Facial Recognition DISCRIMINATES #lawyer

Our Take

Hampton Law's rundown of the research on facial recognition bias hits on something we've been saying since day one: this stuff doesn't work the way the marketing decks claim. Studies keep finding higher error rates for people of color, women, and older folks, which means a misidentification isn't some random, evenly distributed glitch. It lands hardest on people who already deal with more police contact and less benefit of the doubt.

Flock Safety cameras aren't running face recognition themselves, but they're part of the same surveillance stack — feeding location data, vehicle patterns, and "suspicious activity" flags into systems that increasingly get cross-referenced with facial recognition databases elsewhere in a police department's toolkit. When you stitch together plate reads, timestamps, and a bad facial match, you get the kind of false-confidence pileup that's already put innocent people in handcuffs. The tech doesn't have to be perfect to ruin someone's week — it just has to be trusted more than it deserves.

This is exactly why we push people to know what's watching them locally. Check our map to see if Flock cameras are logging your plate, and if you want to push back on how this data gets used and shared in your town, head to take action for concrete steps. Credit to Hampton Law for laying out the research in plain terms — the more people understand the error rates behind these systems, the harder it gets for departments to sell them as neutral.