It begins with a blurry photo of a nameless man with brown skin, short black hair and a goatee.

The photo was seized from surveillance camera footage at a Pasadena bank; the man is suspected of withdrawing nearly $1,000 using a stolen debit card in December 2018.

Attempting to put a name to the face, Pasadena police Cpl. Thomas Blanchard uploads the photo into a database of thousands of mugshots of people previously arrested and clicks “search all.”

What happens next has become a point of controversy in cities across the United States.

Facial recognition software analyzes the nameless face and its contours, and within 17 seconds, it produces 10 top-ranked mugshots of more than 200 possible matches. Among the top ten results, most men have a goatee, most have short black hair, and all have brown skin. One will be considered the No. 1 person of interest.

But, Pasadena police say, that’s not the basis for an arrest.

“This gives us ‘reasonable suspicion’ to look further into this person,” Blanchard said during a news conference Tuesday at the department, where police officials demonstrated the use of the facial recognition technology. The unidentified man whose photo and 2018 case was used in Tuesday’s demonstration was one of hundreds to have their photos uploaded to facial recognition software in Pasadena police investigations.

Since 2017, Blanchard and the Pasadena Police Department have used facial recognition software in at least several hundred cases, uploading between 600 and 700 photos, leading to charges filed against individuals in 30 cases, said Lt. William Grisafe, spokesman for the department.

While police tout its benefits for solving crimes, lawmakers, researchers and civil liberty advocates have cautioned against use of facial recognition technology, citing privacy concerns, issues with accuracy, and possible negative consequences for people and communities of color.

Thursday’s event, was intended, in part, to address some of those apprehensions.

Three years late

“The same thing that we, police officers, care about is what you care about: it’s privacy,” said Pasadena Police Chief John Perez. He acknowledged that the department is three years late in addressing the public about its use of facial recognition technology, but said such a discussion would not have been as relevant as it is today.

Pasadena’s use of facial recognition software is a part of a wave of police departments across the nation to harness the technology in recent years. According to a study conducted by the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law California, one in four police departments in the U.S. can access facial recognition technology. In neighboring San Bernardino County, the Chino Police Department has been using facial recognition to solve cases since around October 2019.

At the news conference, police department officials continually drew a distinction between the software it uses and Clearview AI, a facial recognition application that allows police officers to run photos through a database of more than three billion images, most of which were scraped from social media platforms like Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram, according to a New York Times report published earlier this month. The practice has been called invasive and is the subject of several lawsuits seeking class action status where individuals alleged Clearview violated various privacy laws by taking photos and data from their facial features without their consent or any notices.

While cease-and-desist letters from social media tech companies began to mount, Clearview CEO Hoan Ton-That told CBS in an interview that it has a First Amendment right to the billions of images it has collected.

“The way we have built our system is to only take publicly available information and index it that way,” he told CBS.

Tool to solve crimes

Grisafe said the department does not plan to use Clearview, saying the use of open-source data, such as social media photos, would be irresponsible.

“I don’t want to give the impression that our cops are using Clearview ’cause we’re not. I don’t want people to think that we’re going out and finding ways to put people in jail, ’cause we’re not,” Grisafe said in a phone call last week. “We’re following the rules and laws that are available to us. It’s a tool to solve crimes. That’s really what our intent is: to solve crimes.”

In the 30 Pasadena cases where charges were filed, the police department used the Los Angeles County Regional Identification System, a regional system which compares photos with mugshots from Los Angeles, Riverside, Santa Barbara, and San Bernardino counties, authorities said. Its software is developed by DataWorks Plus. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department investigators have been using the software since 2012.

Pasadena police also use software produced by Vigilant Solutions, a Northern California-based company with a nationwide database of more than 22 million photos of mugshots from all 50 states, including Puerto Rico, and DMV photos in 21 states, excluding California’s DMV.

Since its activation in September 2019, the Vigilant software was accessed in at least 100 Pasadena cases, but has not led to any arrests or prosecution, said Pasadena police Officer Elgin Lee, who investigates property crimes for the department.

False ID fears

Amid the eagerness to embrace facial recognition technology among police, California has also seen a fair amount of resistance.

Assembly bill 1215 signed into state law last November bans the use of facial recognition technology on police body cameras, citing privacy issues and various studies that showed misidentification among people of color.

A National Institute of Standards and Technology study published in December 2019 that looked at the algorithms of the majority of the facial recognition industry found higher rates of false matches for faces of Asian and African American individuals, relative to faces of white people.

Signaling concerns of privacy and saying technological inaccuracies may “exacerbate racial injustice,” several California cities, San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, have passed ordinances that ban their police departments from using any form of facial recognition software.

Opposition to the software has also surfaced locally.

“The trouble is, if you limit the database to mugshots, it’s even less effective and prone to more mistakes,” said Don Weaver, a member of the ACLU Southern California/Pasadena Surveillance Task Force. “And if you expand the database, it’s a mass invasion of privacy. Either way, there are problems.

Pasadena police officials, however, said vetting by detectives after an initial search can help avoid any mistakes in a software’s algorithm.

“We wouldn’t put our name on it if we didn’t have firm belief this was a good lead,” Lee said.

After the news conference, Blanchard said he didn’t know the fate of the 2018 bank fraud case. He only recalled gathering a report identifying the person of interest, which included the lead provided by the facial recognition software, and handing it off to a detective.

Upon request for this story, Blanchard looked up the case this week and found that police never made any arrests. As of today, it remains unsolved.