When two California lawmakers came together Tuesday to champion a bill that would block police departments from using facial recognition technology in their body cameras, it was personal.
After all, both lawmakers — Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, and Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer, D-Los Angeles — were among the 26 state legislators who were falsely identified as criminals when their portraits were compared to a mugshot database.
Ting, who has co-sponsored Assembly Bill 1215 along with the ACLU, argued that body camera technology was implemented across the state in order to build community trust and police accountability.
“Instead of a tool that is really supposed to build bridges, it now becomes a tool of surveillance,” Ting said at a press conference Tuesday.
https://www.facebook.com/aclu.norcal/videos/522875311853302/
Ting said the fact that his face, and those of 25 other lawmakers, showed up as a positive match by the facial recognition program was a demonstration “about how this software is absolutely not ready for primetime.”
https://amp.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article233954187.html