Law enforcement agencies in United States facing lawsuits for their facial recognition technology
The short version: WHAS11 covers ACLU-tracked lawsuits from Black plaintiffs wrongfully arrested after facial recognition misidentifications, underscoring how AI policing compounds surveillance harm with racial bias.
Our Take
WHAS11's report lays out a pattern that watchdogs have been warning about for years: facial recognition tech keeps flagging the wrong people, and the people paying for those errors are disproportionately Black. The ACLU's count of at least five lawsuits nationwide isn't just a legal footnote — it's a body of evidence that this technology is being deployed on the public before it's reliable, with real people getting handcuffed, jailed, and traumatized for crimes they didn't commit.
This matters to the ALPR fight because facial recognition and license plate readers are part of the same surveillance stack. Agencies rarely deploy one without leaning on the other, and both suffer from the same core problem: opaque algorithms making consequential decisions with little independent auditing, minimal transparency to the public, and almost no accountability when they get it wrong. A wrongful arrest from bad face-matching software is the sharper, more visible cousin of the quieter harm ALPR networks like Flock Safety's create — both treat entire populations as suspects first and people second.
If your city is running Flock cameras or considering facial recognition contracts, don't wait for a lawsuit to find out how it's being used. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your community, and visit our take-action page for tools to push back before someone else's face becomes the next false positive.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WHAS11, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.