A university think-tank that has raised concerns about unregulated use of facial-recognition by law enforcement sued the NYPD Tuesday after the department claimed it has barely any documents on how it employs the technology.
The Center for Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law said it filed a freedom of information request for the material during research for an October report that called for new laws on how police departments can search photo databases using the increasingly popular tool.
The NYPD denied the request. After the center appealed, the NYPD said it could not find the specified documents beyond a single memorandum, according to the lawsuit.
The Georgetown group is now asking a court to compel the nation's largest police department to turn over any paperwork, citing statements from NYPD personnel in the press about how much they depend on facial recognition.
A 2016 article said the NYPD facial recognition unit had conducted 8,500 investigations, resulting in 3,000 matches and nearly 2,000 arrests. In a 2015 interview, a sergeant said the unit had "only misidentified five people."
Facial recognition technology collects data from a person's face and then compares that to databases that can have millions of faces, looking for matches.
The Georgetown center said it can be an invaluable tool, but more needs to be done to address privacy and civil liberties issues. David Vladeck, the faculty director, called the NYPD's response to its request "deeply troubling."
"If no records exist, that means that there are no controls on the use of face recognition technology and we ought to worry about that," he said.
"If there are records, then why did the Police Department say that it couldn't find them? The lawsuit we've filed aims to get to the bottom of those questions."
The city Law Department said it was reviewing the lawsuit.