FACIAL RECOGNITION TECH NEEDED TO ID RIOT THUGS
Critics blast system’s ‘racial bias’
CONTROVERSIAL facial recognition technology is essential to help gardai recognise thugs from the Dublin riots, Drew Harris has said.
The manpower required to manually trawl through footage from the unrest last November has taken 22,000 hours of Garda time.
Garda Commissioner Harris yesterday claimed this processing is “unfeasible and ineffective” and wants the force to have modern digital analysis tools.
But civil liberty campaigners fear facial recognition technology does not reliably identify people who are not middle-aged white men. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties warned that FRT could make Ireland a “surveillance State”.
Mr Harris told the Oireachtas Justice Committee yesterday: “Digital evidence that gardai have a duty to process is now at big data scale in terms of its massive volume, complexity of formats and the rate at which it is generated.
“Digital crime and evidence can only be investigated with digital tools.
“Manual processing by garda personnel sitting at screens is becoming unfeasible and ineffective.” The committee is reviewing the Garda Siochana (Recording Devices) (Amendment) Bill that permits FRT.
Helen Mcentee received Cabinet approval for a Facial Recognition Technology Bill after the violence three months ago to help gardai.
But ICCL spokesperson Olga Cronin warned that FRT has a
“racial bias”. She cited examples of miscarriages of justice against black people who have ended up behind bars in countries like America.
She told the Mirror: “It’s faulty, unreliable, and discriminatory.
“That is a real concern about the Bill that is [due] before the Oireachtas. Commissioner Harris stressed that mistakes cannot happen because of human checks and balances.
He said: “There is no question of autonomous machine decisionmaking, ever.
“All decisions that can impact on a person are only taken by identifiable and accountable personnel.”