February 20, 2014
Privacy advocates in the Pacific Northwest are squaring off with local police over plans to install a system that would link surveillance camera video with databases containing photographs of hundreds of thousands of area residents.
In Seattle, Washington, the City Council will soon decide on whether or not they should approve anordinance that green-lights a $1.6 million federal grant, a large chunk of which will be used to purchase sophisticated facial recognition software that supporters of the measure say would help stop crime.
Those Department of Homeland Security dollars would let the Seattle police pay for software that digitally scans surveillance camera footage and then tries to match images of the individuals caught on tape with any one of the 350,000-or-so people who have been photographed previously by King County, Washington law enforcement.
“An officer has to reasonably believe that a person has been involved in a crime or committed a crime”before they begin to use the program, Assistant Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best told KIRO-TV this week