Facial Recognition and Entrenching Racial Discrimination
As new technologies are integrated into law enforcement, there are growing concerns about their potential to reinforce and entrench existing paradigms of discrimination. The enormous power of modern surveillance tools, particularly facial recognition, is itself a game-changing development, which requires a fundamental reconsideration of police oversight and accountability. However, the mainstreaming of these technologies is even more alarming in light of their tendency to amplify racist structures, and to generate disproportionate negative impacts among racialized communities. Despite ongoing attempts to grapple with the broader legacies of systemic racism, police forces across the country are charging forward in their implementation of facial recognition and other algorithmic policing tools, effectively doubling down on the problem.
This conversation featured two leading voices on race and technology, Safiya Noble of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry and Tawana Petty of Data for Black Lives, who discussed the challenges posed by the spread of facial recognition, and avenues ahead for bringing accountability and oversight into the implementation of these powerful new tools.
Speakers: Safiya Noble, UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2) and Tawana Petty, Data for Black Lives
Moderator: Jess Peake, Promise Institute for Human Rights