Name: Laboratório de Identificação Biométrica – Facial e Digital (Brazil)
Area of Application: Policing
What kind of AI according to the project's official information: Facial recognition
Goals: “By means of a search algorithm, possible suspects are identified, and their data will be analyzed by a police fingerprint analyst”, informs the State Government website.
How does it work according to the project's official information: State authorities will be able to identify images of citizens. The objective is to use them mainly in police investigations.
The technology shall not work in real time. The identification will be made by crossing the suspect’s images (captured, for example, by surveillance cameras at the crime scene) with the database of the State Public Security Secretariat, which shall be expanded to cover 45 million individuals. This database is composed of biometric data collected by the government to issue a RG (the standard Brazilian ID). Note from the State Government informs that the system already counts with a database of about 30 million biometric records. The platform is linked to others of the same nature; therefore, it is possible to interact with databases from all Brazilian States through partnerships.
Possible bias: False-positives leading to reinforce structural racism and other forms of discriminations as well as police violence.
Public Institutions Involved: Ricardo Gumbleton Daunt Identification Institute
(IIRGD, Instituto de Identificação Ricardo Gumbleton Daunt).
Companies/Private Institutions Involved: The company Gemalto do Brasil won the public bidding process and meant to invest R$ 5.1 million in connection with the contract.
Other interesting facts: According to the State Government of São Paulo, since 2014, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (Afis) has been locating and cross-checking fingerprints. Now, then, it will also provide facial recognition. Facial recognition technology had already been tested in the State last year, in 2019, during the CONMEBOL America Cup. This year, it will be used, for example, during Carnival. Similar projects are also being implemented in Rio de Janeiro, Ceará and the cities of Salvador (Bahia State) and Campinas (São Paulo State). In Rio, the Facewatch system is used; a note from the State Government states that some 1,100 wanted people from the State might be identified automatically if they pass through the service cameras. “We at Disque Denúncia [a crime reporting hotline] are responsible for providing the database, with images of wanted, dangerous criminals, the main targets of the State of Rio de Janeiro. This information will be used by the cameras to perform facial recognition. If one of these wanted persons enters somewhere that is monitored, they can be identified”, says Zeca Borges, coordinator of the hotline. The Civil Police of São Paulo will use, for the first time at the city’s Carnival, facial recognition technology to identify fugitives and missing persons. This time, the system will also work in real time, with dozens of cameras around the city automatically identifying these people in the Police database, which comprises more than 32 million faces.
The facial recognition system already existed, but the identification was done in a static manner, capturing an image that was only afterwards compared with the database. From now on, this process is to be dynamic, performed in real time, automatically. The system captures the images and immediately cross-checks them with the database.
The Facewatch technology has been used in the UK for seven years, with more than 30,000 cameras spread across the country.
