This is the sort of regulation that our industry has earned. We wanted to build this sort of thing, and it turns out that what we wanted to build is harmful to society.
I've visited Portland a handful of times, each time marveling at its beauty, charm, and small-metro vibe. Even so, I fell into the California-nativist trap of seeing it as a the lesser sister city of the Bay Area.
In the last year, Portland has shown a commitment to the American ideals of justice, equality, and freedom that place it among cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Birmingham.
Portland also promised that they’d stop using teargas, 24 hours before the police tear gassed several square blocks. I am dubious of Portland’s ability to actually enforce such a ban, given that their police department doesn’t seem responsive to political control.
The Sheriff holds more power than most people realize. You can change the laws, but if you don't change the sheriff, then you get the same old police tactics.
Let's put it this way: if the Sheriff breaks the law, who will arrest them?
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This is in contrast to a Commissioner, like in NYC. If the commissioner breaks the law, the Mayor can fire them. Then the next commissioner can arrest them.
Sheriffs do have a lot of power, and are not immune from prosecution by federal or state authorities. Some states do have provisions for the arrest of the Sheriff. Here's an example from Indiana: "A warrant for the arrest of the county sheriff shall be served by the coroner or any other person to whom it may be legally directed. The coroner, who shall commit the sheriff to the county jail, has custody of the jail and its prisoners during the imprisonment of the sheriff."
In Massachusetts, counties (and sheriffs are a county position) are mostly vestigial judicial and law enforcement districts and the state even eliminated about half of its counties in the late 1990s.
On the other hand, when I lived in Louisiana, parish government (their equivalent of counties) was powerful so a sheriff was an important position.
> Literally no one can arrest him in this situation
Assuming the law is criminal, and applicable, city police probably can arrest him.
It seems quite probable, though, that the city does not have the authority to regulate county or state law enforcement tactics, so the law is simply invalid as applicable to him, which isn't a “we have a sheriff as opposed to some other structure of county law enforcement” problem, but “we are trying to regulate the actions of higher levels of government” problem.
EDIT: Actually, looking at your story, it doesn't look like there is any law at all—the Mayor of Portland made a policy change directed at his subordinates, which include the city police but not the Multnomah County Sheriff's Dpeartment. So no one can arrest anyone because there is no criminal law, except insofar a side of force inconsistent with city executive policy is covered by some criminal law applicable to Portland Police.
> EDIT: Actually, looking at your story, it doesn't look like there is any law at all—the Mayor of Portland made a policy change directed at his subordinates,
Good eye. I didn't notice that. In any case, the use of tear gas at demonstrations seems solidly like a "police tactic" to me.
If your area has elected police leaders, then its important to choose a sheriff that you believe in.
> so the law is simply invalid as applicable to him, which isn't a “we have a sheriff as opposed to some other structure of county law enforcement” problem, but “we are trying to regulate the actions of higher levels of government” problem.
As far as I'm concerned, this is a "most people don't seem to understand how their own government works". The Sheriff's check on power is the election. The locality elects the Sheriff, which is why its usually so difficult to remove the Sheriff (because the Sheriff represents the will of the people).
Sheriffs are relatively hard to remove by the very design of the office. It makes their elections very important.
Does city ordinance trump the county in which it resides when it comes to law enforcement? Does the city of Portland have legal jurisdiction over the county Sheriff?
This is only an argument about “protest tactics” if you make it. I’m interested less in “teargas, good or bad” and more interested in “can the political apparatus of Portland actually change the behavior of the Portland police?”. In the context of Portland banning the police from using specific technologies, this question is absolutely relevant.
You can't subpoena for data that doesn't exist. If facial recognition is implemented in businesses and schools, the associated databases will be used by police and government.
Seattle also banned chemical weapons, but unfortunately the mayor sued to allow their use. Because Seattle's police dept was under a consent decree, any changes to tactics and weapons needed to be approved by the judge who is monitoring the dept. The judge felt the Seattle police might actually get significantly more violent if they couldn't use chemical weapons and indiscriminate projectiles on non violent protestors.
Setting aside the actual subject at hand, I actually think this is a much better process. Like or dislike the result, it actually flowed through the proper political and judicial channels in order to achieve a result. This seems much safer than (what seems to me) a total disconnect between the political and police apparatus in some cities, where the cops just ignore what they’re told to do.
Oh, for sure. As much as I'd love to see them totally ban the use, it seems like every step was fairly reasonable. City Council enacts a law, Mayor (who cannot veto it because the council will override it) works with the police to push back, judge examines it and says that the court will have to evaluate the legality of the law in light of the consent decree on the police department.
Seattle is dealing with a low grade left wing insurgency[0], just like Portland, which is intentionally starting fights with police, night after night, destroying private property, and occasionally killing someone, like Aaron Jay Danielson, or the two children killed by Antifa-BLM "security" in CHAZ/CHOP. So the judge is right, but it has to do with the ongoing violent insurgency, not law abiding Americans peacefully exercising their rights. The only nonviolent protestors I've seen getting gassed are the ones giving direct cover to a Black Bloc.
Calling tear gas a “chemical weapon” is a rhetorical exaggeration that conjures up comparisons to actually lethal chemical weapons like nerve gas. The two are not the same. The 1925 Geneva protocol has exceptions for riot control agents to be used in various circumstances specifically because its wording is otherwise overly broad. Tear gas is a non lethal tool to bring crowds under control. The alternative is to let crime happen or to put both the police and criminals at greater risk.
In case of Seattle’s attempt at banning use of tear gas, the federal judge also didn’t say “the police might get significantly more violent”. Do you have a source on that, because it feels like editorializing. From https://crosscut.com/2020/07/judge-blocks-seattles-ban-tear-...
> The DOJ argued that implementing a ban on tear gas and other crowd control weapons, which the Seattle City Council passed in June, would result in “irreparable harm resulting from officer confusion and the inability to modulate force or de-escalate situations in which force may be needed.”
> "The issuance of this immediate change, without time for additional direction or training, is likely to result in officer confusion," he wrote.
> Calling tear gas a “chemical weapon” is a rhetorical exaggeration that conjures up comparisons to actually lethal chemical weapons like nerve gas.
Tear gas is, categorically, a chemical weapon. Just as rubber bullets are projectile weapons. You can call it a "less lethal chemical weapon" if you like, but it's no less a chemical weapon.
Tear gas is absolutely a chemical weapon. It's use is not allowed in war. It can be lethal, and can cause significant harm to people sensitive to it. Sure, it's a milder chemical weapon than, say, nerve gas but it is absolutely a chemical weapon.
Can we shut down the semantics discussion? It leads nowhere. Folks can call tear gas a “chemical weapon” because it is chemical and is a weapon. Other folks can think and say that calling “tear gas” a chemical weapon is an abuse of terminology. Both points are valid. Both points lead nowhere. It shuts down productive discussion.
Do you think the judge's case is not plausible? Cops are not superheroes, they're simply (often undertrained) civilians who happen to be wearing a uniform. They want to go home, too. Without teargas what type enforcement mechanism are they expected to use against an increasingly belligerent public? My guess is that it won't be their batons or bare fists; it will probably be their guns, which increases tensions on both sides.
The idea that anyone should be allowed to track the movement of everyone in a city is incredibly dystopian. No one needs the power to automate tracking people, and the potential for abuse is overwhelmingly high.
There's a difference between being anti-technology and being anti-one-specific-application-of-a-technology.
Analogously, saying "hey maybe cops shouldn't shoot citizens to death" is not a fundamentally anti-gun stance. For example, the Black Panther Party famously had patrols, armed with long guns, who directly challenged police brutality.
Yeah, funny, I've been in the tech industry for a decade working on some of the highest scale systems there are. But yeah, Luddite, lol.
Fun fact, Luddites were not anti technology. They destroyed machines because they were worried (correctly) that capitalists would race to the bottom in pay, firing all the people who were trained in producing textiles.
I'm with you on the originalist use of Luddite as a labor movement... but I've generally come to accept that, like "literally", demanding precision here is a lost battle.
These laws sound good, but I don’t trust that any layer of government would willingly give up that data source, and definitely not the more secretive agencies. I fear these types of laws will only further disarm the general populace and even activists, since we will not feel any pressure to develop awareness of and countermeasures for something that “can’t be used”. If this tech exists then it will be used, just maybe not admitted to.
I imagine you wouldn’t find out. Parallel construction would be easy with city-wide CCTV plus face recognition. Maybe an officer would “just happen” to be walking by and think you look suspicious for some reason.
Or the law will have exceptions for special emergency circumstances. And the government will operate under a permanent state of special emergency circumstances due to the threat to their safety (whatever it is that particular day).
Meanwhile levying big fines against any local stores who use the technology for their own security.
That would be a little difficult to pull off at the municipal level. The federal government doesn't even fully implement that strategy, which is why we are unlikely to ever see systemic fixes for consumer data protection at the Federal level (that doesn't involve barriers to entry that favor established industry).
I don’t think a totally binary “alternative” is a viable thing in these situations. In the short term, people should assume their face is capable of being identified and tracked in real time and act accordingly. For some people that would certainly amount to self-censorship of choosing to avoid certain places/events/activism. Other people would probably be drawn to create some sort of new generation of “CV Dazzle”-like fashions/cosmetics.
In the far long term maybe people will be able to generate or design a brand new face for themselves on demand. Facial recognition is only so scary when the thing it recognizes is effectively a permanent identification card that must be worn at all times (pandemic times notwithstanding lol)
Note: I shall talk of politics in this comment. I am not offering any opinion on the politics of either Biden and Democrats or Trump and Republicans.
Regardless of the merits of such a ban or the lack thereof, why do it rightnow?
Maybe I've missed some subtleties in Portland politics, but the impression I've gotten is that the people there and the politicians that win elections there would greatly prefer that Biden beat Trump in the US presidential election that is 23 days from now.
One of the points Trump has been trying to run on is that he supports law and order and the Democrats support crippling law enforcement to aid anarchists and far left extremists who want to destroy everything good about America.
I will not be at all surprised if this ban becomes part of Trump's message at rallies and in ads and helps drive some votes to him.
There is no good way for Biden to counter that. If he comes out in agreement with the ban, it helps Trump's law and order message. If he comes out against the ban to appeal to the law and order voter, without a long explanation of subtle tradeoffs involved, he'll alienate some voters on the left. If he comes out against the ban with a long and subtle explanation, he'll still alienate those voters because who the heck is going to actually read the long and subtle explanation?
We are at the "sound bites are all that matters" stage of the election, and Portland is giving Trump a great sound bite. The damage minimizing option for Biden is to just ignore it, ceding those law and order voters to Trump.
What about facial recognition in Portland is so urgent that they could not wait a month on this?
Portland has been under protests and many of the articles written about what’s happening in Portland regularly reference police and federal police brutality in those protests. That is, law enforcement officers doing harm to the general public in those protests.
These laws probably spawn out of that. It’s dealing with the manifestations they’re seeing in the protests at that local level.
I don’t live in Portland and I don’t read the articles closely. This is an uneducated guess.
I live here and would generally agree with your assessment.
You bring up a good point about dealing with local issues. This movement is centered around a municipal budget concern, which is diverting funds from the police department to other forms of emergency response and community support programs. That our city is now the poster-child of the Trump campaign is telling.
Biden could simply do what politicians usually do when taking a stance on a matter is inconvenient for them: simply ignore it. Talk about other things when asked about it. This seems to work well for politicians, so I don't see a dilemma.
Your entire argument rests on the premise that somehow governments cannot do multiple things at once. However, part of the responsibility of the government is to always exist to serve and protect the people.
That need does not abate merely because the president is a fascist. He already marks himself clearly by positioning himself as diametrically opposite antifascism. No amount of propaganda can disguise that fact. And further, we know from history that appeasement does not work on fascists; we cannot merely sit back and let him have his way now while we plan for a future where he has mysteriously vanished.
The mere existence of Portland is offensive to their political ends; it frustrates them that people might want a better society, and vote thusly. Good! Let them be frustrated; we have no obligation to be nice or pleasant to fascists. I will enjoy seeing them cry when we elect a female antifa mayor soon.
I'd need to see the specific wording of the law, but it sounds like the exceptions need to be carefully examined. The ban in Boston enables the police to simply contract a private agency, for example; creating private surveillance companies with less oversight than the police. FR is a Pandora's Box, and it is already out in the public's hands. With legal exceptions and a history of simply ignoring legal transgressions when it comes to law enforcement, the situation does not look positive.
Indeed, it's a hard philosophical problem. On one hand we need to respect peoples privacy, but on the other FR would allow the police to act faster and catch dangerous people before they do more harm to society. I just hope they don't add a clause about dismissing evidence if FR was somehow part of the process, nothing is sadder than reading the "we have evidence of X doing Y, but the evidence was sent via improper channels so we can't prosecute"-stories.
An issue that concerns me is the necessity for an understanding of racial blindness. This is the inability to distinguish between subtle facial differences, such as seen in siblings and near age cousins of an ethnicity other than one's own ethnicity. It is becoming clear the human operators of FR systems need to be screened for racial blindness. I work in FR myself, and from my perspective the management of and operators of FR systems are simply unaware this is an issue and the obvious solution.
What is the difference between facial recognition "technology" and having a group of people with good memories and access to photos / videos of past events? Just the scale of it? How far back they can remember? The fact that they can't sit on every street corner? Is it just a practical argument?
And for example, does this prevent a hotel from implementing facial recognition so that they could greet a guest by name when they walk up to your check-in counter?
This news is over a month old. Portland needs facial recognition. It has criminal rioters regularly breaking the law without any consequence. The city’s leadership is allowing violence in the name of political goals to continue unchecked, and is weakening their police department’s ability to uphold the law and enforce it equally upon everyone. Having facial recognition would at least help a department with limited resources act more efficiently. Instead of relying on random luck and memory to spot a suspect while on patrol, it reduces the search to potential matches that have a much higher likelihood of being apprehended and charged.
Those concerned about false positives should keep in mind that there is always a human in the loop to confirm matches - which makes the overall system ultimately no less accurate than a human’s ability to spot a suspect randomly. It doesn’t make sense to arbitrarily limit the use of technology here any less than it would to ban a police department’s access to electricity or other utilities.
You either believe in having a police department (in which case you want it to be effective and efficient) or you don’t believe that and are okay with police being abolished. The gray space in the middle doesn’t make logical sense to me.
They have cops breaking the law everywhere... on video sometime taken by their own camera... and often suffer no consequenses. Not sure how facial recognition would help since they already know who they are.
The policy is to drop charges that do not involve violence or destruction of property. 70% of charges resulting from the protest were for city ordinance violations such as trespass.
I live in Portland. I march and exercise my Constitutionally-guaranteed right to peaceably assemble. On many occasions, Federal agents and police have preemptively declared peaceful gatherings "riots" and deployed riot-control agents and less-than-lethal munitions unprovoked. In others, they have not waited to declare such or order the crowd to disperse, and deployed tear gas and shot into the crowd anyway. Contrary to what Fox News is telling you, rioting is far from regular and I have yet to witness actual law-breaking beyond resisting arrest or disobeying law enforcement. The DA is dropping 70% of protest-related arrests because they don't involve violence or property damage.
So I hope you can understand how little trust I hold in the police to make sure the suspect they caught on camera actually committed a crime. Consider a gray space in the middle where the system of policing we have needs reform before we can trust police with tools that make them more effective at acting against the communities they serve. Police should have been protecting protestors and their rights, but they have been antagonistic and violent from the start.
Whether you agree or disagree with this ban seems to fall on two divisive opinion sets:
1) Facial recognition does more (less) good than harm
2) The police should (shouldn't) be given tools to do their job better
I'm very firmly in the "agree with both" camp, and it might make people that disagree on one or both opinions happy to hear that I'm starting to think the world is not heading in (what I view as) a good direction.
I'm embarrassed that you live in my city, too. Get off the fence already. By framing the problem as whether the police need tools to do their job, you've accepted the idea that heavy-handed police-driven violence is a necessary part of our society.
Maybe I'm missing something, but you don't have to accept heavy-handed police-driven violence to understand that it's important for the police to be able to do their job better. Not to be more violent, but to be better policemen. If that involves using facial recognition to be able to detect threats of rioting and violence, then so be it, as long as that technology is used in accordance with laws and regulations protecting your civil liberties. Why is that wrong?
I find that the typical missing link to understand this response is trust in the police. If you trust them to do their job (and trust that their job is actually to protect the community, not attack it), you also typically trust in them to properly use the tools at their disposal. In that case, you typically think about the benefits of those tools and how they can let police do their job _better_ instead of how they could be abused or used for wrong.
If people don't trust the police (or think that their job/role is a negative one), then they probably tend to focus more on the potential downsides or bad possibilities that could come with new or improved tools (of which there are many with facial recognition). If you don't like what the police are already doing, it's easy to assume giving them the tools to do it better would be a Very Bad Bad thing.
You definitely don't have to accept heavy-handed police-driven violence (which I don't) to understand that it's important for the police to be able to do their job better. Ironically, I think that physically unobtrusive information-based solutions (like FR) that let officers do their job with more information and less unpredictability would result in _less_ physical violence.
Whenever they ban facial recognition, they should make it broader and also ban license plate tracking, bluetooth tracking, wifi tracking, TPMS tracking, etc... Because they are as bad, if not worst, then facial recognition.
I don't understand that, what's the difference between letting a computer search or a human search? at the end a human looks at the result and can confirm if the match looks the same or not. This will just make police work slower and will let criminal elements flourish.
Another thing, if we ban government and the police using it, why not ban it for everybody? Why Google can use it but not the government? At least with the government I can vote them out if they miss use it but what power do we have ver those huge corporates?
It seems to me like it it a power grab by those corporates, they want to have this power but not the government which might prevent them from taking over the world while preaching to us how good they are and on "the right side of history".
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadIn the last year, Portland has shown a commitment to the American ideals of justice, equality, and freedom that place it among cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Birmingham.
Portland does the US proud.
https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1919
The Sheriff holds more power than most people realize. You can change the laws, but if you don't change the sheriff, then you get the same old police tactics.
Let's put it this way: if the Sheriff breaks the law, who will arrest them?
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This is in contrast to a Commissioner, like in NYC. If the commissioner breaks the law, the Mayor can fire them. Then the next commissioner can arrest them.
State or federal law enforcement officers, or, even city police. Depending on the specific structure of the department, possibly his own deputies.
Sheriffs are not, in theory or practice, immune to arrest, e.g.: https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/embattled-...
* Portland city passes a law, where its now illegal for police to use tear gas (https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racia...)
* The use of tear gas remains legal in the State, and Federal governments. (This appears to be a local law and/or ordinance).
* Local Sheriff decides the law is stupid, uses tear gas anyway.
The Sheriff hasn't broken any state, or federal law. Only the local law. Literally no one can arrest him in this situation.
Really depends on the locality.
In Massachusetts, counties (and sheriffs are a county position) are mostly vestigial judicial and law enforcement districts and the state even eliminated about half of its counties in the late 1990s.
On the other hand, when I lived in Louisiana, parish government (their equivalent of counties) was powerful so a sheriff was an important position.
Assuming the law is criminal, and applicable, city police probably can arrest him.
It seems quite probable, though, that the city does not have the authority to regulate county or state law enforcement tactics, so the law is simply invalid as applicable to him, which isn't a “we have a sheriff as opposed to some other structure of county law enforcement” problem, but “we are trying to regulate the actions of higher levels of government” problem.
EDIT: Actually, looking at your story, it doesn't look like there is any law at all—the Mayor of Portland made a policy change directed at his subordinates, which include the city police but not the Multnomah County Sheriff's Dpeartment. So no one can arrest anyone because there is no criminal law, except insofar a side of force inconsistent with city executive policy is covered by some criminal law applicable to Portland Police.
Good eye. I didn't notice that. In any case, the use of tear gas at demonstrations seems solidly like a "police tactic" to me.
If your area has elected police leaders, then its important to choose a sheriff that you believe in.
> so the law is simply invalid as applicable to him, which isn't a “we have a sheriff as opposed to some other structure of county law enforcement” problem, but “we are trying to regulate the actions of higher levels of government” problem.
As far as I'm concerned, this is a "most people don't seem to understand how their own government works". The Sheriff's check on power is the election. The locality elects the Sheriff, which is why its usually so difficult to remove the Sheriff (because the Sheriff represents the will of the people).
Sheriffs are relatively hard to remove by the very design of the office. It makes their elections very important.
[0] A report by Rutgers explaining the extent of the insurgency and its tactics and ideology https://ncri.io/reports/network-enabled-anarchy/
In case of Seattle’s attempt at banning use of tear gas, the federal judge also didn’t say “the police might get significantly more violent”. Do you have a source on that, because it feels like editorializing. From https://crosscut.com/2020/07/judge-blocks-seattles-ban-tear-...
> The DOJ argued that implementing a ban on tear gas and other crowd control weapons, which the Seattle City Council passed in June, would result in “irreparable harm resulting from officer confusion and the inability to modulate force or de-escalate situations in which force may be needed.”
> "The issuance of this immediate change, without time for additional direction or training, is likely to result in officer confusion," he wrote.
Tear gas is, categorically, a chemical weapon. Just as rubber bullets are projectile weapons. You can call it a "less lethal chemical weapon" if you like, but it's no less a chemical weapon.
The idea that anyone should be allowed to track the movement of everyone in a city is incredibly dystopian. No one needs the power to automate tracking people, and the potential for abuse is overwhelmingly high.
Analogously, saying "hey maybe cops shouldn't shoot citizens to death" is not a fundamentally anti-gun stance. For example, the Black Panther Party famously had patrols, armed with long guns, who directly challenged police brutality.
Fun fact, Luddites were not anti technology. They destroyed machines because they were worried (correctly) that capitalists would race to the bottom in pay, firing all the people who were trained in producing textiles.
Meanwhile levying big fines against any local stores who use the technology for their own security.
In the far long term maybe people will be able to generate or design a brand new face for themselves on demand. Facial recognition is only so scary when the thing it recognizes is effectively a permanent identification card that must be worn at all times (pandemic times notwithstanding lol)
Regardless of the merits of such a ban or the lack thereof, why do it right now?
Maybe I've missed some subtleties in Portland politics, but the impression I've gotten is that the people there and the politicians that win elections there would greatly prefer that Biden beat Trump in the US presidential election that is 23 days from now.
One of the points Trump has been trying to run on is that he supports law and order and the Democrats support crippling law enforcement to aid anarchists and far left extremists who want to destroy everything good about America.
I will not be at all surprised if this ban becomes part of Trump's message at rallies and in ads and helps drive some votes to him.
There is no good way for Biden to counter that. If he comes out in agreement with the ban, it helps Trump's law and order message. If he comes out against the ban to appeal to the law and order voter, without a long explanation of subtle tradeoffs involved, he'll alienate some voters on the left. If he comes out against the ban with a long and subtle explanation, he'll still alienate those voters because who the heck is going to actually read the long and subtle explanation?
We are at the "sound bites are all that matters" stage of the election, and Portland is giving Trump a great sound bite. The damage minimizing option for Biden is to just ignore it, ceding those law and order voters to Trump.
What about facial recognition in Portland is so urgent that they could not wait a month on this?
These laws probably spawn out of that. It’s dealing with the manifestations they’re seeing in the protests at that local level.
I don’t live in Portland and I don’t read the articles closely. This is an uneducated guess.
You bring up a good point about dealing with local issues. This movement is centered around a municipal budget concern, which is diverting funds from the police department to other forms of emergency response and community support programs. That our city is now the poster-child of the Trump campaign is telling.
And honestly, what Portland or democrats actually so has so little impact on what trump says, that they might as well do what they want.
That need does not abate merely because the president is a fascist. He already marks himself clearly by positioning himself as diametrically opposite antifascism. No amount of propaganda can disguise that fact. And further, we know from history that appeasement does not work on fascists; we cannot merely sit back and let him have his way now while we plan for a future where he has mysteriously vanished.
The mere existence of Portland is offensive to their political ends; it frustrates them that people might want a better society, and vote thusly. Good! Let them be frustrated; we have no obligation to be nice or pleasant to fascists. I will enjoy seeing them cry when we elect a female antifa mayor soon.
And for example, does this prevent a hotel from implementing facial recognition so that they could greet a guest by name when they walk up to your check-in counter?
Those concerned about false positives should keep in mind that there is always a human in the loop to confirm matches - which makes the overall system ultimately no less accurate than a human’s ability to spot a suspect randomly. It doesn’t make sense to arbitrarily limit the use of technology here any less than it would to ban a police department’s access to electricity or other utilities. You either believe in having a police department (in which case you want it to be effective and efficient) or you don’t believe that and are okay with police being abolished. The gray space in the middle doesn’t make logical sense to me.
So the surveillance video isn't going to matter for protests anyway.
So I hope you can understand how little trust I hold in the police to make sure the suspect they caught on camera actually committed a crime. Consider a gray space in the middle where the system of policing we have needs reform before we can trust police with tools that make them more effective at acting against the communities they serve. Police should have been protecting protestors and their rights, but they have been antagonistic and violent from the start.
Whether you agree or disagree with this ban seems to fall on two divisive opinion sets:
1) Facial recognition does more (less) good than harm
2) The police should (shouldn't) be given tools to do their job better
I'm very firmly in the "agree with both" camp, and it might make people that disagree on one or both opinions happy to hear that I'm starting to think the world is not heading in (what I view as) a good direction.
If people don't trust the police (or think that their job/role is a negative one), then they probably tend to focus more on the potential downsides or bad possibilities that could come with new or improved tools (of which there are many with facial recognition). If you don't like what the police are already doing, it's easy to assume giving them the tools to do it better would be a Very Bad Bad thing.
You definitely don't have to accept heavy-handed police-driven violence (which I don't) to understand that it's important for the police to be able to do their job better. Ironically, I think that physically unobtrusive information-based solutions (like FR) that let officers do their job with more information and less unpredictability would result in _less_ physical violence.
That is what local police in Washington State do to get around the state's long standing restrictions on wire-tapping.
Another thing, if we ban government and the police using it, why not ban it for everybody? Why Google can use it but not the government? At least with the government I can vote them out if they miss use it but what power do we have ver those huge corporates?
It seems to me like it it a power grab by those corporates, they want to have this power but not the government which might prevent them from taking over the world while preaching to us how good they are and on "the right side of history".