Assembly committee advances bill restricting use of facial recognition technology in arrest warrants

A bill that would prohibit police from relying solely on facial recognition technology to establish probable cause for an arrest warrant cleared the Assembly Public Safety and Preparedness Committee on Monday in a party-line vote.

“By their very nature, facial recognition systems used in law enforcement contexts do not and cannot guarantee an exact match,” Reissman said.

“Once a facial recognition system produces a candidate, the existence of those candidates taints the rest of the investigation,” he said.

He suggested that advances in artificial intelligence could eventually produce facial recognition systems capable of virtually flawless identification.

Rather than restricting the technology, Kanitra proposed requiring facial recognition matches to meet a minimum confidence threshold before they could independently establish probable cause.