Professor Jonathan Witmer-Rich was quoted in an article titled, “Cleveland police use facial recognition without training or transparency on its use,” published by Ideastream Public Media. The article discusses a recent criminal case in which Cleveland police used facial recognition technology to obtain a search warrant in a murder investigation.

In recent public comments to City Council, Cleveland Public Safety Director Wayne Drummond stated that the Cleveland Real Time Crime Center does not use facial recognition technology. However, the recent criminal case shows that the Real Time Crime Center sent images to the Northeast Ohio Fusion Center, which conducted the facial recognition search on their behalf.

Professor Witmer-Rich opined that Cleveland police should be more open about what technology they’re using and how they’re using it.

“What body of images do we want the police to be using if, if using it at all?” Witmer-Rich said. “And is it anything that a company can scrape off of the internet, or should it be something more limited than that? Something that’s limited to a certain set of images that we know are reliable or that we know haven’t been manipulated?”