Municipal police departments in Auburn, Bellevue, Kirkland and Redmond have been experimenting with facial recognition since at least 2016, according to emails published by the ACLU, but it’s unclear if those cities have continued to use facial recognition since then. The 2020 state law does require disclosure if a department wants to renew its contract.
Another part of the law states police need a warrant to conduct “ongoing surveillance/persistent tracking” except in undefined “exigent circumstances.” It directs judges to report any such warrants to the Administrative Office of the Courts, which told Crosscut it has received no reports of such warrants since the law’s passage. However, the law requires reporting of warrants only after they expire or if they are rejected, meaning that active warrants are not disclosed.
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Crosscut reached out to courts in King, Pierce and Spokane counties seeking copies of any warrants issued for “ongoing surveillance/persistent tracking” since the law was passed. Spokane and King counties both said they were unable to track warrants by this specific type, and a Pierce County clerk said he looked through a batch of warrants since the law was passed, but did not find any relating to the use of facial recognition for ongoing surveillance.
Gary Ernsdorff, a supervising attorney in the King County Prosecutor’s office who works closely with police investigations, said that he was not aware of any such warrants and was confident that he would know about them if they existed. But he also cautioned that such warrants would likely be sealed to avoid tipping off the person being watched.
The ACLU was critical of the state law when it passed in 2020. Lee said it allows for broad use of facial recognition to surveil crowds in public places, such as protests, and that there’s no penalty for flouting the transparency rules.
In her view, technologies like facial recognition exacerbate existing biased practices within police departments. Studies of facial recognition have shown it to be less accurate at identifying women and darker-skinned people.
“Throughout history surveillance has targeted marginalized communities,” Lee said. “Now we are talking about technology [that] we can’t even understand how it’s being used.”
