Kansas City, Missouri, is moving to equip cameras on some public buses with facial recognition software that can identify passengers who appear on a list of banned riders or missing persons, a surveillance plan that puts ordinary riders under the gaze of the transit apparatus while the city pushes ahead with local and federal money after the state of Missouri declined to help fund it.
Who Gets Watched
The project would check images captured by cameras aboard the buses immediately against active alerts generated when a missing person, banned rider or someone on a law enforcement watch list designated by the transportation authority is identified. If no match or safety issue is detected, the facial data would not be retained. After the buses return to the depot, the transportation authority would archive the regular video footage on a local server for up to five years.
Tyler Means, chief mobility and strategy officer at the Kansas City Transportation Authority, said the state of Missouri declined to help fund the project as expected because of concerns with the facial recognition component, but that the city is pushing ahead with local and federal money. Means said, “Privacy is always a tricky thing,” and added, “We’ve always had cameras on our buses. It’s just new technology. I think in time it’ll smooth over and people will realize, ‘Well, it didn’t really feel any different.’”
The Surveillance Sales Pitch
SafeSpace Global, the Knoxville, Tennessee-based company partnering with Kansas City to run the cameras, started using live facial recognition years ago to alert nursing homes when residents left the building, then brought the technology to correctional institutions and schools. Kansas City’s buses represent the company’s inaugural venture in transportation. Scott Boruff, SafeSpace Global CEO, said, “It’s not sitting there filming all the time. It just captures the face and goes away.”
Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the Project on Speech, Privacy and Technology at the American Civil Liberties Union, said, “The idea of running face recognition on a camera that is pointed on live spaces in public is a line that until recently has never really been crossed in the last 25 years.” Stanley warned that it is nearly impossible to limit the scope of a surveillance project when artificial intelligence is involved. “It may be used for a very narrow watch list today, but there are very good reasons to think it’ll expand over time,” he said.
Will Owen, communications director for the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said, “City residents should not be guinea pigs for transit systems to test Silicon Valley’s latest unproven, biased surveillance tech.”
A Familiar Pattern of Control
Backers of the effort point out that security cameras are already found nearly everywhere — even on Kansas City’s buses — and some law enforcement agencies have used facial recognition software to identify suspects spotted on video. Cameras with other types of AI-powered software have been installed on public buses and school buses in other cities to read the license plates of nearby vehicles and ticket the ones spotted committing infractions such as illegally parking in a bus lane. Privacy advocates are concerned about those devices as well, but they are particularly alarmed by cameras that could actively record faces even when no crime is committed.
The history of these systems is already littered with backlash and abuse. Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, police in Tampa, Florida, used facial recognition cameras in the Ybor City neighborhood to search for crime suspects, but there was immediate opposition and the program was soon abandoned, Stanley said. More recently, New Orleans police secretly relied on facial recognition surveillance cameras run by a private company despite a city ordinance prohibiting the technology, The Washington Post reported last year. Although the program was believed to have been paused, Stanley wrote a report for the ACLU last month that found it was still operating in some capacity, citing emails an activist obtained through an open records request.
Detroit partnered with some gas stations and liquor stores in 2016 to install high-definition cameras that relayed live feeds of violent crimes directly to the police department. But after a New York Times investigation found footage was paired with facial recognition software to make arrests, some of the accused filed successful lawsuits claiming they were wrongly targeted due to faulty technology that misidentified Black suspects. James Craig, the police chief at the time, said officials felt the backlash and changed the rules over how facial recognition could be used without scrapping the program entirely. But he still advocates for the technology, provided it is used correctly, and says it would be a shame for cities to abandon one of their best tools for securing the streets. “If the police department or the city doesn’t have the insights to build in strong policies, transparent policies and accountability, the knee jerk reaction is, ‘Well, let’s just ban it,’” Craig said.
The cameras were expected to be installed on Kansas City’s buses this spring, but organizers halted the effort just before launch, derailing hopes that they would be up and running in time for the World Cup matches the city began hosting this week. The delay was partly technical — a need to upgrade Wi-Fi routers to support both the cameras and a new fare collection system on the buses — and partly financial due to state government funding falling through. Means said he is confident the program will launch this year and “a little bit bigger” than initially planned, with potentially as many as 30 buses instead of the nine that had been planned under the pilot.
Boruff said the company is ready to start installing the Kansas City cameras as soon as the money comes through, although it will likely take three to four months to configure the software for the city’s specific needs. Ryana Parks-Shaw, a City Council member serving as mayor pro tem, said she is not disappointed that the rollout has been delayed. “I think they need to take their time and do it right,” Parks-Shaw said. “I believe that any use of this kind of technology must be approached carefully, transparently and with clear guardrails.” As for securing buses during the World Cup without the facial recognition cameras, Means said the reconfigured plan includes up to 40 more officers patrolling stops and transit centers. “We’re kind of going old school to address what we hoped the technology would do,” he said.