Watching the Watchmen: Open Oversight and Police Accountability

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Increased state use of facial recognition technology threatens to increase the power dynamic between the state and disenfranchised communities. However, what happens when individuals use facial recognition to watch the watchers? OpenOversight is an open-source project that promotes police accountability through public data. Users can look through photos to identify an officer against whom they would like to complain.

Recently, the OpenOversight team has begun leveraging facial recognition in order to make the project more efficient. Rather than having volunteers hand-sort the photos, AWS Rekognition categorizes photos as containing or not containing police officers. After a discussion of this technical implementation, the talk will close by discussing legal considerations that we encountered, such as department-specific guidelines and compliance with Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act.