DanceSafe is a public health nonprofit that provides harm reduction services, such as fact-based drug education and drug checking, at live music and other events. However, we believe that our mission extends into cultural harm reduction, including providing consent education and educating our community about highly problematic developments in the live event industry so that we can collectively respond and protect our community.

In 2018, Ticketmaster and Live Nation (a singular entity which, at the time of their merger in 2008, owned 80% of the market share) released an investor report stating that they had invested in Blink Identity, a facial recognition firm, with the intention of replacing physical and digital tickets with biometric information. The alarming nature of this report suggests that an attempt at mainstreaming facial recognition looms in the not-so-distant future, and we are compelled to contextualize the technology within our harm reduction and consent education mission. Facial recognition represents a dystopic advancement of the police state. In a country where one in three adults has a federal criminal record by the age of 23 and a half-century War on Drugs has disproportionately targeted communities of color, there is no justice in mainstreaming facial recognition technology that will likely share and compare biometric databases with those of law enforcement.

When thinking of outstanding warrants, your mind may go to robbery, identity theft, or violent crime. However, the reality is that most law enforcement resources go toward enforcing lower level offenses, especially drug possession and related convictions. In the United States, people of color and low income communities have suffered the most from the War on Drugs, but it is also fought internationally with catastrophic consequences. It is our belief that the War on Drugs is inherently unjust, and in John Ehrlichman’s own words, the War on Drugs was begun to break up communities of color and the anti-war movement:

“You want to know what this was really all about,” Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said, referring to Nixon’s declaration of war on drugs. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

esearch has demonstrated the facial recognition incorrectly identifies targets up to 98% of the time, especially if the target is not a white male. Mainstreaming this technology is particularly dangerous for people of color and gender-nonconforming people because the artificial intelligence powering facial recognition was built on databases of overwhelmingly white, male faces . It often cannot recognize Black faces as human, cannot distinguish between non-white faces, and regularly misidentifies non-male faces. This is a highly problematic tendency that already contributes to the over-criminalization of communities of color (due to the human cognitive bias called Beyond the injustice of the War on Drugs, facial recognition technology is highly inconsistent – rIt often cannot recognize Black faces as human, cannot distinguish between non-white faces, and regularly misidentifies non-male faces. This is a highly problematic tendency that already contributes to the over-criminalization of communities of color (due to the human cognitive bias called outgroup homogeneity , and more specifically cross-race bias ), and automating policing with facial recognition will only increase harassment and false identification of people of color.

The crimes that most people are accused of are related to the War on Drugs and crimes of poverty. If an AI uses these government databases to identify “criminals” at live music events, there is a high probability that fans of color will be harassed and targeted by law enforcement despite their innocence. Considering that police shootings are the number one cause of death for young black men in the United States and ICE regularly deports US citizens that were misidentified as undocumented immigrants, this is literally a matter of life and death for people of color.

This integration represents a terrifying leap towards dystopia. We have already given up so much liberty for the sake of “security,” but the mainstreaming of facial recognition must be where this stops. Lack of regulation has already blurred the line between public and private sector, and this has led us into dangerous and uncharted waters with Amazon’s integration of Ring with police surveillance networks . However, there is no regulation strict enough for such an inherently toxic and problematic technology. We must be very wary of the age-old police state arguments of “security and safety” and ban facial recognition.