News & Commentary

To this day, I have not been able to watch the whole video of George Floyd’s execution by police on a Minneapolis street. Nor can I bring myself to view the countless other recordings of Black and brown people who have been unlawfully killed by those sworn to protect and serve the public. I start having flashbacks about my own traumatic police encounter that happened when I was 16 — a still vivid memory 11 years later. I’m reminded of how easily I could have ended up as another name chanted in the streets during Black Lives Matter protests.

Facial recognition and predictive policing technology fuel the exact type of intrusive and racially discriminatory policing that people are protesting against.

The state of California just made it clear: Face recognition surveillance isn’t inevitable. We can — and should — fight hard to protect our communities from this dystopian technology.

Building on San Francisco’s first-of-its-kind ban on government face recognition, California this week enacted a landmark law that blocks police from using body cameras for spying on the public. The state-wide law keeps thousands of body cameras used by police officers from being transformed into roving surveillance devices that track our faces, voices, and even the unique way we walk. Importantly, the law ensures that body cameras, which were promised to communities as a tool for officer accountability, cannot be twisted into surveillance systems to be used against communities.

UPDATE: The Union City Police Department informed the ACLU that it does not operate license plate cameras and has no license plate detection data to share with ICE. Union City provided a recent sharing report and screenshots showing that ICE is not listed as a sharing partner and that Union City has not contributed “detections” data to the LEARN database.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using mass location surveillance to target immigrants. And local governments like Merced and Union City, California, are helping — feeding their residents’ personal information to ICE, even when it violates local privacy laws or sanctuary policies. Today, the ACLU is urging an immediate end to this information sharing.