The artificial-intelligence system has transformed a corner of suburban Oregon into a testing ground for the future of criminal justice.
By Drew Harwell Drew Harwell National technology reporter covering artificial intelligence Email Bio Follow April 30 at 5:19 PM HILLSBORO, Ore. — When workers at an Ace Hardware here reported a young woman had walked out of the store with an $11.99 tank of welding gas that she hadn’t paid for in her tote bag, an elaborate high-tech crime-fighting operation sprang into action.
Then in late 2017, the Washington County Sheriff’s Office became the first law enforcement agency in the country known to use Amazon’s artificial-intelligence tool Rekognition, transforming this thicket of forests and suburbs into a public testing ground for a new wave of experimental police surveillance techniques.
"Just like any of our investigative techniques, we don’t tell people how we catch them,” said Robert Rookhuÿzen, a detective on the agency’s major crimes team who said he has run “several dozen” searches and found it helpful about 75 percent of the time. “We want them to keep guessing.”Sheriff’s officials say face scans don’t always mark the end of the investigation: Deputies must still establish probable cause or find evidence before charging a suspect with a crime.
“The government is incredibly powerful, and they bring a lot to bear against an individual citizen in a case,” said Mary Bruington, the director of the Washington County Public Defender’s Office, which represents defendants who can’t afford an attorney. “You couple that with Amazon? That’s a powerful partnership.”
Some of Amazon’s rivals have spurned similar contracts. Microsoft President Brad Smith said in April that the company had recently declined to provide its facial-recognition software to a California law enforcement agency that wanted to run a face scan anytime its officers pulled someone over, but that it had approved a deal putting the technology in a U.S. prison. Microsoft declined to provide details.
“People love to always say, ‘Hey, if it’s catching bad people, great, who cares,’ ” said Joshua Crowther, a chief deputy defender in Oregon, “until they’re on the other end.” Deputies immediately began folding facial searches into their daily beat policing, and Adzima built a bare-bones internal website that let them search from their patrol cars. He dropped the search-confidence percentages and designed the system to return five results, every time: When the system returned zero results, he said, deputies wondered whether they’d messed something up.
For training, deputies are emailed only a printout of the office’s facial-recognition policy and a short PowerPoint presentation cautioning them to be careful with the results. One slide shows how the system responded to an uploaded mug shot of O.J. Simpson: by returning a photo of a white man with a beard. “As you can see,” the slide reads, the system “still requires human interpretation.
Still, the promise of cheap and easy identification has proved too compelling for many companies to ignore. The federal agency that assesses facial-recognition algorithms, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, recently said it had tested 127 systems from 44 companies on their “scalability to large populations” and accuracy in identifying “noncooperative subjects” photographed “in the wild.
The system’s results, Brown added, could pose a huge confirmation-bias problem by steering how deputies react. “You’ve already been told that this is the one, so when you investigate, that’s going to be in your mind,” he said. “The question is no longer who committed the crime, but where’s the evidence to support the computer’s analysis?”
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