By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune News Editor

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

NATIONAL Security Minister Wayne Munroe said though facial recognition CCTVs may wrongly identify someone as a criminal, “being arrested on suspicion and being held up to 48 hours is part of the price we pay for living in a free, democratic, orderly society”.

“This is what the prime minister talks about when he talks about potential inconvenience,” he said during yesterday’s Office of the Prime Minister press briefing. Prime Minister Philip “Brave” Davis said on Sunday that more intrusive policing is coming in response to the soaring murder rate. He said the government will install more surveillance technology using facial recognition CCTVs to help with crime detection.

 The New York Times reported facial recognition technology flaws in 2019. The National Institute of Standards and Technology reported that year that the systems falsely identified African-American and Asian faces ten to 100 times more than Caucasian faces. As part of that study, researchers accessed more than 18 million photos of about 8.5 million people from mug shots, visa applications and border-crossing databases in the United States.

 Yesterday, Mr Munroe said ordinary eyewitness identification can also lead to arresting the wrong person. He noted that judges inform jurors that visual identification can be mistaken.

 “They’re not talking now about a picture that you can freeze, so if you have facial rec where we have a shooting here and we query the system and it says the person who shot the person is at the podium at the OPM press office and they come and pick me up, when they sit me down at some point since the evidence is the original recording, they will look at the original recording and say oh that’s not Munroe,” he said.

 “I will be inconvenienced by having been arrested on suspicion, but being arrested on suspicion and being held up to 48 hours is part of the price we pay for living in a free, democratic, orderly society, and so this is what the prime minister talks about when he talks about potential inconvenience.

 “So the facial recognition, the artificial intelligence component, could lead to them wrongly identifying you because it looks very close to the person who did it, but when you sit down and now look at the picture, if you ever have to say it’s not you, sorry.”

 Mr Munroe described facial recognition technology as a tool that can free the innocent and convict the guilty.

 “As we expand the coverage of CCTV footage, the beauty of technology is it could exonerate you just as well as it could implicate you,” he said. “So if someone were wrongly identifying you based on a visual identification, if you don’t have the CCTV, you will get charged because the person will pick you out of a line-up, and we have what the judge says. But if we have the CCTV footage, we’ll be able to stop it, look and be able to say that’s not the person.”