Use of Clearview AI and FRT by police forces in Minnesota
Information Certainty: Documented
Deployment Purpose: Criminal investigations, Surveillance
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Products and Institutions:
Status and Events:
| Status | Ongoing |
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Users:
Location:
| City | Saint Paul Minneapolis (MN) |
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| Country ⠉ | USA USA |
Description[ ]
Police forces in Minneapolis use an extensive array of surveillance tools. Facial recognition was banned in 2021. However the range extends beyond these capabilities, and the force previously denied using tools which they were subsequently confirmed to have been using, such as Clearview AI. St Paul Police have been found to use Briefcam and it is also suspected to have been used by MPD. Police have used Axon body cameras. Although Axon states they do not use FRT.
According to documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News, more than 10 users with the Minneapolis Police Department had run more than 160 searches with Clearview as of February. The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office, which oversees the county that includes Minneapolis, had also conducted nearly 400 searches among 10 accounts. And the Minnesota Fusion Center — a specialized section of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) that shares crime intelligence — had run almost 40 searches as of February 2
The neighboring St. Paul Police Department had conducted nearly 40 searches with Clearview's facial recognition tool as of February. And the police department of Prior Lake, Minnesota, a suburb about 20 miles southwest of Minneapolis, racked up more than 1,100 searches between July 2019 and February 2020 with three Clearview accounts 2
Records obtained by local journalist Tony Webster showed that the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office has deployed facial recognition since 2013. In July, the Star Tribune reported the office ran a suspect’s photo taken from Instagram through a facial recognition tool to reveal a possible match 2
The Minneapolis PD also uses a wide range of other surveillance tools. In a 2019 white paper, the department said it used automatic license plate readers, or devices that capture images of license plates, allowing police to potentially track the movement of a person throughout a city or region. In 2009, the city paid Tennessee-based traffic camera company PIPS Technology more than $50,000 for both fixed and mobile license plate readers 2
The Minneapolis Police Department also has a five-year contract with police body camera company Axon, which lasts through 2021. The agreement involves providing body cameras to all 888 sworn police officers in the city. The police department received a grant from the Department of Homeland Security in 2018 to help pay for these cameras 2
Minneapolis also hosts an array of CCTV cameras, which the police can access. The Minneapolis Police Department said in a surveillance white paper that it uses Milestone software from Arxys — a video management tool that claims to offer "video motion detection" and "video analytics" — to analyze CCTV footage 2
The Minneapolis Police Department has paid more than $2 million for ShotSpotter, an audio surveillance tool that listens for gunshots and visualizes possible shooting locations on a map. There’s no evidence, as of right now, that ShotSpotter effectively reduces crime and makes cities “safer,” which the company claims 2
Additionally, several local police departments in the Minneapolis metropolitan area — including those in Spring Lake Park, Brooklyn Center, Plymouth, St. Louis Park, and Edina — have signed contracts with Ring, Amazon’s home surveillance company, according to the company’s map of active partnerships 2
After a trial run, the St. Paul Police Department got BriefCam up and running a few weeks ago. They plan to use it for major cases, such as homicides, serious assaults, robberies and sexual assaults 1
References
- a b "Police to Implement Video Technology to Help Investigations". (2020) <https://www.governing.com/community/Police-to-Implement-Video-Technology-to-Help-Investigations.html> Accessed: 2022-06-26
- a b c d e f g h i "Facial Recognition And License Plate Readers: Here Are The Surveillance Tools Used By The Minneapolis Police Department". (2020) <https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolinehaskins1/george-floyd-protests-surveillance-technology> Accessed: 2022-06-25