A police department collected 65,000 face scans over 7 years - but it didn't lead to a single arrest

Thomas Peter/Reuters

• San Diego's police force used facial recognition for seven years, collecting over 65,000 face scans during that time - but the program didn't lead to a single arrest, a spokesperson told Fast Company.
• The program has now been shuttered thanks to a new California law banning the use of facial recognition by government agencies.
• However, police departments across the country are still embracing facial recognition as a tool to track people and identify suspects.
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Seven years and over 65,000 face scans later, San Diego Police Department's use of facial-recognition technology did not lead to a single arrest and was not used in a single prosecution, a police spokesperson told Fast Company.

San Diego is one of many major cities across the US to embrace facial recognition. While the tool has been heavily hyped for its potential to track people and identify possible suspects, Fast Company's findings call the effectiveness of facial recognition into question.

Critics of the technology have also pointed to studies suggesting that it's biased against women and people of color. A federal study published last month found that facial recognition algorithms were up to 100 times more likely to misidentify black people and Asian people than white men, and women were more likely to be misidentified across the board.

San Diego's facial recognition program was shuttered on January 1 in accordance with a new California law that bans government agencies from using facial recognition for the next three years.

A spokesperson for San Diego police did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The police department told Fast Company that the only biometric technology it would use going forward is fingerprint scans.

The city was one of the first major municipalities in the US to embrace facial recognition in 2013. At the time, Reveal News, a nonprofit investigative outlet, reported that San Diego law enforcement heralded it as a boon to preventing crime.

That prediction doesn't appear to have come to fruition. When California's facial recognition ban went into effect this month, a police spokesperson told Fast Company that it was unlikely to have "much of an impact on our department."

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