Should cops be allowed to have facial recognition? #facialrecognition #privacy matters.#Police

Our Take

Credit to ECHOWORKS for putting the question so bluntly: should cops have facial recognition at all? It's a fair fight to pick, and it's really the same fight we cover every day, just with a different sensor. Flock Safety's ALPR cameras already log the movements of ordinary drivers who've done nothing wrong, building searchable histories of where you go and when. Facial recognition is the next logical layer on top of that — instead of just knowing your car was somewhere, the system knows it was you.

The pattern is familiar. A tool gets sold to city councils as a narrow fix for a specific crime problem, deployed with little public debate, then quietly expanded, shared across agencies, and left with almost no independent audit of accuracy or misuse. Facial recognition carries the added baggage of documented false-match rates that fall hardest on Black and brown residents, meaning the risk isn't hypothetical — it's who gets stopped, questioned, or worse over a bad algorithmic guess.

Whether or not your local department has rolled out face-matching tech yet, the ALPR network that would feed it is probably already up in your area. Check our camera map to see what's watching your streets, and if you want to push back before facial recognition becomes the next default, our take-action page has the tools to start that conversation with your city.