For Alabamians with mental illness, incarceration can be life-threatening

by Ralph Chapoco, Alabama Reflector
February 3, 2025

The worst moment for Stacey Fuller came at a Jefferson County jail prior to a scheduled transfer to a state prison.

“It was way overcrowded, the conditions were bad, the anger was building and the depression,” said Fuller, who was being held on a drug-related charge. “I started having really toxic thoughts about hurting other people.”

She filed a complaint and a request for mental health services to address her anguish.

A guard learned of the complaint and entered the cell block screaming, she said.

“She wanted to know who put this in and why, just screaming, ‘Who is the dumb hoe who put this in?’”

The guard pulled Fuller aside for a conversation.

“I stood up and walked down those steps,” Fuller said. “I think that was probably the worst moment. She took me down the hall and told me we don’t complain about stuff, that by putting in a request, they would deal with it when they dealt with it.”

Attorneys who litigate cases that involve people who deal with mental illness or a mental health crisis, along with advocates seeking to improve treatment and conditions for those with mental illness state that people suffering from mental illness who are incarcerated in Alabama’s jails are placed into harsh environments that can exacerbate their suffering and, in the worst cases, can result in their death.

According to experts interviewed, comparing the treatment of people dealing with mental health conditions and substance use disorders — in which people cannot control their use of legal or illegal drugs, alcohol or medications —  across the nation is difficult because there is no standard for care, with local corrections officials left to decide the treatment options and protocols when they are in custody.

The number of people incarcerated with a mental illness in Alabama and around the country, as well as the types of mental illnesses those people have, is difficult to determine, because the data collection is not robust.

A 2009 study estimated that about 14.5% of the male population in jail nationwide and 31% of the female population had a serious mental health condition, from major depressive disorder to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

States have latitude in establishing the system to assist people in crisis in a carceral setting. Alabama leaves it up to the individual counties, particularly sheriffs’ departments, to decide on treatments, and more importantly, how much care people should receive.

But incarceration presents serious issues for people going through a mental health emergency.

“Prisons and jails are not built, just generally speaking, are not built to be places that address, effectively, a person’s mental health concerns,” said Latasha L. McCrary, a staff attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Fuller said she suffered from chronic pain stemming from a vehicle crash in 2007 while working as a nurse in hospice care. During that time, nurses were allowed to call in prescriptions for patients, and she said she began calling into the pharmacy to obtain pain medication for herself when she got caught as part of a traffic stop in October 2008.

“I was speeding and made a wrong turn,” Fuller said. “They saw them on the floor. ‘Can I see that pill bottle?’ Stupidly, I didn’t know what to do. Next thing I knew, there were five cop cars, and I was going to jail.”

According to court records, Fuller was booked into Cullman County jail on a possession charge, and state law required her to stay in custody for at least 24 hours. She said the nurse who spoke to her during intake allowed her husband to deliver medication for depression and post traumatic stress disorder while she was incarcerated.

“And that was actually, I didn’t know it at the time, but a very kind, gentle, introduction,” Fuller said.

Fuller said she was then assigned to drug court and entered rehabilitation. But a month later, according to court records, she was arrested in Jefferson County, this time for fraudulently obtaining the medications that she was arrested for earlier in Cullman County when she was charged with illegal possession.

The Alabama Reflector found two cases pertaining to Fuller. The first was a recreational drug possession charge in October 2008 filed in Cullman County. That was followed by five charges that were filed in Jefferson County for conspiracy to fraudulently obtain controlled substances by fraud.

“They stick you in the jail population,” Fuller said. “Stick you in these cell blocks like animals, and then forget about you. There are no questions. You don’t ask any questions. You don’t have any complaints, and there you are.”

Fuller survived a month in the Jefferson County jail before getting transferred to the Tutwiler Women’s Correctional Facility in Wetumpka where she endured another six months, without medication, before she completed her sentence. 

‘They actively conspired to neglect and abuse him’

In January 2023, Steve Mitchell visited his cousin Anthony in Carbon Hill Jail in Walker County. According to a later lawsuit, Steven had not seen Anthony in several months, and Anthony had physically transformed.

“Tony, who was six foot three or four, had previously weighed around two hundred forty pounds. Now, Steve at first took Tony for an old man. Tony was haggard and emaciated, weighing no more than a hundred forty or a hundred fifty pounds,” according to the lawsuit.

Anthony Mitchell was experiencing a mental health episode, Steve said, when he was taken into custody.

He was placed in isolation at the Carbon Hill Jail, in a cell with a cement floor and a drain to be used as a toilet, according to the lawsuit. The cell, according the was not meant for long-term custody, only during the booking process.

According to the lawsuit, Tony was given a mat to sleep on and was not provided with a jail uniform. The lawsuit alleges he was naked for most of the time he spent in jail. It wasn’t clear whether Mitchell received any kind of mental health treatment.

Two weeks after being taken into custody, at 4 a.m. on Jan. 26, 2023, Mitchell was found lying unresponsive in his cell.

A physician at the hospital who treated Tony indicated that he had a body temperature of 72 degrees, according to the lawsuit.

“The cause of this hypothermia is not clear,” the lawsuit quoted a physician stating. “It is possible he had an underlying medical condition resulting in hypothermia. I do not know if he could have been exposed to a cold environment. I do believe the hypothermia was the ultimate cause of his death.”

Multiple messages were left with both the Walker County Commission and the Walker County Sheriff’s Office seeking comment.

The attorney representing the Walker County Sheriff’s Office declined comment, citing the ongoing litigation. In court filings responding to a lawsuit from the Mitchell family, attorneys for the sheriff’s office called the allegations “the definition of scandalous,” alleging that “ the entire complaint is built upon a false premise that Mitchell was placed in a freezer.”

“Based on nothing but speculation, plaintiff accuses the defendants of murdering plaintiff’s decedent, Tony Mitchell (Mitchell) by placing him in a freezer until he suffered and died from hypothermia and then accuse the Defendants of covering up the murder,” the filing stated. “These allegations intentionally created a firestorm of derision that swept not only these Defendants but law enforcement in general and caused criminal investigations to be opened against the Defendants.”

In a lawsuit filed in 2023, Mitchell’s family accuses jail personnel of restraining him and keeping him exposed to cold conditions starting the evening before his death. The lawsuit states surveillance footage shows Tony raising his head, peering out at deputies pleading for help.

The suit alleges that it was nearly 8 a.m. when jail staff were seen with a uniform for Tony. Then, at 8:30 a.m., they entered his cell with a wheelchair, the first time in several hours that staff tended to him, according to the lawsuit.

“After initially placing him in the chair, deputies pick Tony up and drag him back inside the cell, evidently to conceal his presence as a new female detainee is brought into the booking area and processed, further delaying Tony’s access to the emergency medical treatment he obviously urgently requires,” the lawsuit states. He was pronounced dead that afternoon.

Eight corrections officers have pleaded guilty to one count of deprivation of rights, according to CBS42. One nurse pleaded guilty to denying Mitchell care resulting in his death.

For roughly a year and a half, Ryan Cagle and several others have been regular attendees at Walker County Commission meetings with a single message: Walker County Sheriff’s Office should be held accountable for jail deaths like Mitchell’s, or those that occurred with law enforcement present.

“Watching how the sheriff’s department treated someone who had clear mental health issues, they didn’t just not provide him care, but they actively conspired to neglect and abuse him,” said Cagle, a resident and advocate living in Walker County.

“We spent countless hours, every month, for the past year and a half, all but yelling at the county commission to regulate and hold the sheriff’s department accountable, but also to use the opioid money, the national settlement opioid money, to fund a non-police response team so that we can stop allowing police to be the first line of response to mental health needs,” he said.

At least two other lawsuits have been filed against the Walker County Sheriff’s Office, according to court records.

In September 2021, Frederick Hight filed a lawsuit against the Walker County Sheriff’s Office after a deputy shot and killed his son, Fredrick Hight Jr., when he was dispatched to the scene as part of a mental health call in February 2021. The parties eventually settled the case, according to media reports.

The second lawsuit was filed in June 2023 by Chris Hambric after his son, Greg Hambric, was shot and killed by a Walker County Sheriff’s deputy in June 2021. That case is ongoing.

Dangers of incarceration and mental illness

While the alleged incidents in Walker County are extreme, multiple experts interviewed stated that placing people with mental health conditions into custody and housing them in jail is problematic because of the chaotic nature of the environment.

“Every type of mental illness is disproportionately represented in people in jails than it is in the community,” said Lauren Kois, a clinical and forensic psychologist who worked in Alabama but is now at the University of Virginia studying serious mental disorders in prisons and jails.

A report published in 2016 by the Public Citizen’s Health Research Group and the Treatment Advocacy Center based on surveys of 230 sheriffs’ departments in 39 states, found that almost 96% of the facilities reported having some individuals within their custody with a serious mental illness between September 2010 to August 2011.

Roughly 75% of the facilities reported a larger number of people with serious mental illness compared with five to 10 years before.

A study of 1,300 people incarcerated at an unnamed jail in the Midwest published this year found that 20% of those surveyed suffered from some type of mental illness and another 78% had a substance use disorder.

Access to mental health care has been a focus of an ongoing lawsuit in Alabama state prisons. A federal district judge ruled in 2017 that a lack of access to adequate mental health care in state prisons violated incarcerated Alabamians’ Eighth Amendment rights and ordered the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) to institute reforms.

The judge also ordered that the ADOC intensify its recruitment of corrections officers to increase staffing within the facilities. Staffing was identified as one of the key reasons that people incarcerated were not receiving adequate mental health services.

“In the context of mental health, that means that a person could be in a crisis and not have a correctional staff person near or around to be able to observe that fact that they committing, or attempting to commit suicide, or that they harm themselves in some way, that they are having some kind or crisis or breakdown that needs immediate attention,” McCrary said.

People with a mental illness can get into contact with the criminal justice system in a variety of ways. For example, individuals with mental illness who are homeless may be caught violating rules and regulations that deal with loitering or trespassing.

“Jail is going to be more for lower-level offenses, so they are going to be more associated with quality-of-life offenses, things like criminal trespass, criminal mischief,” Kois said. “It could be sleeping in a place where you are not supposed to be sleeping or urinating in public because Starbucks wouldn’t let you go to the bathroom anymore because you scare people.”

Ideally, medical personnel would conduct a thorough evaluation of a person with a mental illness facing incarceration, according to Lisa Dailey, executive director of Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC), a national nonprofit that focuses on improving the lives of people suffering from mental illness.

That evaluation would determine which type of treatment is most appropriate, with medication readily available that can be administered relatively quickly.

The individual would then be placed into an area of the facility dedicated to individuals with either medical or mental health needs separate from the general population because they are vulnerable to abuse or harm.

The person would then be transferred to a medical facility as soon as possible and removed from jail while remaining in custody.

In most cases, though, jails and prisons assess individuals in a rudimentary process that can be delayed, Dailey said. Many times, the initial determination of a person’s mental health is done at a court proceeding when a person raises an issue of the defendant’s mental health, according to Dailey.

If a psychiatric facility is full, a person could wait in a correctional facility for months before being admitted, all while struggling with illness.

Treatment can also be costly, according to John Hollingsworth, director of Alabama Crisis Intervention Training, who trains law enforcement and other personnel for how to deal with mental health emergencies when encountering it in the field. Some medications can cost upwards to $1,000 per prescription, which people who are homeless cannot afford.

“It is a complex group of symptoms,” Hollingsworth said. “There is not a blood test that says you are bipolar. You have to show certain symptoms over a certain period before they diagnose you. Once they diagnose you, there are different levels.”

Treatments available in the state’s jails are also limited, and those who need specific medications may not be able to get them.

Most jail settings are chaotic and harmful for people undergoing crisis.

“Sometimes they are just fighting to get the medication they already know that they need,” McCrary said. “You combine that with the feeling of, ‘Here I am in a place that I don’t want to be with people I don’t want to be around,’ or if I have severe anxiety and I am in a dorm with 50 other people, my anxiety just magnifies.”

‘You cannot thrive and survive at the same time’

Fuller has since been released after fulfilling her obligation to the criminal justice system.

Despite that, she had trouble finding a job for a few years, which included stints working in hazardous cleanup and cleaning buildings at night.She also got work picking blackberries and making bracelets to sell.

Her therapist recommended she become a certified peer to help others who have been involved with the criminal justice system. She went through training before working with people who have a substance use disorder.

“I used my lived experience to help others get into recovery,” Fuller said. “What I did was act as a public liaison between the judge, the public defender’s office and the jails.”

Fuller is currently a case manager for Birmingham Reentry Alliance.

“I help people help themselves by finding resources. Because if you are just looking for food and shelter, you are just surviving,” she said, “and you cannot thrive and survive at the same time.”

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com.

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Alabama lawmakers want to prioritize essential services as COVID funds disappear

by Alander Rocha, Alabama Reflector
February 3, 2025

Amid the loss of federal COVID relief funds and a likely decline in at least one state revenue stream, legislators say they want to prioritize critical services as they get ready to put the state’s two budgets together in the 2025 session.

Rep. Rex Reynolds, R-Huntsville, chair of the House Ways and Means General Fund Committee, said that although he expects the General Fund budget to come in around $3.7 billion for fiscal year 2026, which starts October 1 — a $400,000 increase from the previous year — $275 million has already been set aside for conditions line items from the previous budget, including $200 million for prisons, $50 million for prison personnel, and $35 million for the State House.

COVID funding and historically high income and sales tax revenues left state coffers flush over the last several years, allowing legislators to pass supplemental funding bills near the start of the legislative sessions. But Reynolds said he expects reduced supplemental appropriations — if any  —  as the budget-making process for the General Fund starts in the House this year. With uncertainty around what may happen to interest on state accounts and an expectation that it might decrease, Reynolds said that although the General Fund is strong, future revenue projections are affected by these factors.

“We’ll be back to basic budgeting, prioritizing the most critical services we provide as a state,” Reynolds said in a phone interview.

The Alabama Legislature begins its 2025 session on Tuesday.

Kirk Fulford, deputy director of the Legislative Services Agency’s (LSA) Fiscal Division, said in an email Thursday that “interest on state deposits is what is concerning.”

The General Fund, which draws from more than 40 revenue streams, saw interest earnings on state deposits rise from roughly $19 million in 2021 to more than $557 million in 2024, driven by high cash reserves and elevated interest rates. The Federal Reserve has decreased interest rates by a single percentage point, and, further cuts may occur depending on economic policies set by the new administration.

“The last time the Federal Reserve reduced interest rates by over 1% in 2020, we saw a reduction in interest on state deposits to the General Fund by over 45% over a 6-month period following the reduction, and we had far less money invested the than we do right now,” Fulford said. “It is potentially a big deal.”

He added that a similar rate reduction in 2020 led to a more than 45% decline in interest earnings over a six-month period, despite the state having fewer funds invested at the time. 

Medicaid costs are also a concern, with significant anticipated increases despite the removal of over 300,000 people from the program’s rolls after pandemic-era policy kept states from disenrolling recipients. Reynolds is waiting for further details from the Alabama Medicaid Agency on expected costs, but lawmakers are expecting a substantial increase in the state’s share of the Medicaid program, which could top $1 billion for the first time in history. 

The number, while large, would only be a fraction of the total program; the federal government is expected to pay about 73% of the cost of Medicaid in 2026, according to KFF.

Sen. Greg Albritton, R-Atmore, chair of the Senate Finance and Taxation General Fund Committee, voiced the same concerns, saying they are “going to be trying to hold the reins on any supplementals and things that might be proposed” because of the expected increase in the Medicaid Agency budget.

“We’re not having to take from anybody yet. But if our revenue, which is flat now, takes a dive of any type, it’s going to put a squeeze on everybody,” Albritton said.

On the education side, Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, chair of the Senate Finance and Taxation Education Budget Committee, said that although he is expecting a supplemental appropriation bill of around $500 million, budgeting for the 2026 fiscal year will also be tighter than in previous years in which Alabama received significant federal financial aid.

“We’re now kind of trending back to the norm, and we’re going to have to make decisions and set priorities,” Orr said.

Orr said his top priority this session will be advancing a hybrid funding model for public schools, which would allocate more resources for students with special needs, English learners, and those from low-income backgrounds.

He also said that lawmakers will consider whether to extend or modify the state’s tax cut on overtime pay, which is currently set to expire in June. That tax cut ended up decreasing revenue to the state by more than the initial projection of $34 million, at $230 million from January 2024 through September 2024, Fulford said.

Minority Leader Rep. Anthony Daniels, D-Huntsville, defended the extension of an overtime tax and said he’ll push to extend it, citing a 13.65% increase in corporate tax receipts and a 1.92% rise in individual income tax receipts, totaling $191 million and $130 million, respectively. He further argued the overtime bill has boosted productivity and workforce participation, leading to economic benefits, adding that the $230 million cost is offset by increased consumer spending and productivity gains, totaling over $450 million.

Blue Cross Blue Shield proposed establishing an “ALLHealth plan” aimed at providing private health insurance to up to 330,000 eligible Alabamians, either through ALLHealth or premium assistance for employer-provided insurance using Medicaid expansion funding.

Albritton, although skeptical about the program’s reliance on federal funds, said it is worth considering because “it’s not a government plan” and the state “can’t afford Medicaid as it is hardly.”

“There are several things that are positive about it. My concern is how much it’s going to cost … I just don’t know that we’re capable of handling that program without having monies for it,” Albritton said.

With Alabama’s prison population rising and crime legislation on the horizon, Albritton said there is a need for a balanced approach to crime legislation.

“We don’t want to make felonies of everything that’s a misdemeanor,” he said. “I don’t want to put people away when we don’t have to.”​

Mental health services are another key concern. Legislators are looking for ways to support existing crisis centers, though they do not plan to fund a new one in the next fiscal year, and address the long-term care gap.

“The budget will be tight. We will not be adding any additional crisis centers. We’ll better focus on our services this year, still looking at what we can do long term for long term beds,” Reynolds said.

Despite expecting a slowing economy, legislative leaders remained optimistic about the budgets’ overall economic health.

“Even with the decline in revenue in the General Fund, we’ll still see one of the largest General Funds in the history of Alabama, so I feel like our economy remains strong,” Reynolds said.

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com.

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Facial recognition in policing is getting state-by-state guardrails

by Paige Gross, Alabama Reflector
February 1, 2025

In January 2020, Farmington Hills, Michigan resident Robert Williams spent 30 hours in police custody after an algorithm listed him as a potential match for a suspect in a robbery committed a year and a half earlier.

The city’s police department had sent images from the security footage at the Detroit watch store to Michigan State Police to run through its facial recognition technology. An expired driver’s license photo of Williams in the state police database was a possible match, the technology said.

But Williams wasn’t anywhere near the store on the day of the robbery.

Williams’ case, now a settled lawsuit which was filed in 2021 by the American Civil Liberties Union and Michigan Law School’s Civil Rights Litigation Initiative, was the first public case of wrongful arrest due to misuse of facial recognition technology (FRT) in policing.

But the case does not stand alone. Several more documented cases of false arrests due to FRT have come out of Detroit in the years following Williams’ arrest, and across the country, at least seven people have been falsely arrested after police found a potential match in the depths of FRT databases.

Williams’ lawsuit was the catalyst to changing the way the Detroit Police Department may use the technology, and other wrongful arrest suits and cases are being cited in proposed legislation surrounding the technology. Though it can be hard to legislate technology that gains popularity quickly, privacy advocates say unfettered use is a danger to everyone.

“When police rely on it, rely on them, people’s lives can be turned upside down,” said Nate Wessler, one of the deputy directors of the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at the national ACLU.

How are police using FRT?

Facial recognition technology has become pervasive in Americans’ lives, and can be used for small, personal tasks like unlocking a phone, or in larger endeavors, like moving thousands of people through airport security checks.

The technology is built to assess a photo, often called a probe image, against a database of public photos. It uses biometric data like eye scans, facial geometry, or distance between features to assess potential matches. FRT software converts the data into a unique string of numbers, called a faceprint, and will present a set of ranked potential matches from its database of images.

When police use these systems, they are often uploading images from a security camera or body-worn camera. Popular AI company Clearview, which often contracts with police and has developed a version specifically for investigations, says it hosts more than 50 billion facial images from public websites, including social media, mugshots and driver’s license photos.

Katie Kinsey, chief of staff and tech policy counsel for the Policing Project, an organization focused on police accountability, said that she’s almost certain that if you’re an adult in the U.S., your photo is included in Clearview’s database, and is scanned when police are looking for FRT matches.

“You’d have to have no presence on the internet to not be in that database,” she said.

The use of FRT by federal law enforcement agencies goes back as long as the technology has been around, more than two decades, Kinsey said, but local police departments began using it in the last 10 years.

Usually, police are using it in the aftermath of a crime, but civil liberties and privacy concerns come from the idea that the technology could be used to scan faces in real time, with geolocation data attached, she said. Kinsey, who often meets with law enforcement officers to develop best practices and legislative suggestions, said she believes police forces are wary of real-time uses.

Boston Police attempted to use it while searching for the suspects in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, for example, but grainy imaging hindered the technology in identifying the culprits, Kinsey said.

Wrongful arrests

FRT’s role in wrongful arrest cases usually come from instances where police have no leads on a crime other than an image captured by security cameras, said Margaret Kovera, a professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and an eyewitness identification expert.

Before the technology was available, police needed investigative leads to pin down suspects — physical evidence, like a fingerprint, or an eyewitness statement, perhaps. But with access to security cameras and facial recognition technology, police can quickly conjure up several possible suspects that have a high likelihood of a match.

With millions of faces in a database, the pool of potential suspects feels endless. Because the technology finds matches that look so similar to the photo provided, someone choosing a suspect in a photo array can easily make a wrong identification, Kovera said. Without further investigation and traditional police work to connect the match chosen by the technology to a crime scene, the match is useless.

“You’re going to up the number of innocent people who are appearing as suspects and you’re going to decrease the number of guilty people,” Kovera said. “And just that act alone is going to mess up the ratio of positive identifications in terms of how many of them are correct and how many of them are mistaken.”

In the seven known cases of wrongful arrest following FRT matches, police failed to conduct sufficient followup investigation, which could have prevented the incidents. One man in Louisiana spent a week in jail, despite being 40 pounds lighter than a thief allegedly seen in surveillance footage. A woman who was eight months pregnant in Detroit was held in custody for 11 hours after being wrongfully arrested for carjacking, despite no mention of the carjacker appearing pregnant.

When Williams was arrested in January 2020, he was the ninth-best match for the person in the security footage, Michael King, a research scientist with the Florida Institute of Technology’s (FIT) Harris Institute for Assured Information, testified in the ACLU’s lawsuit. And detectives didn’t pursue investigation of his whereabouts before making the arrest.

Detroit police used the expired license image in a photo array presented to a loss-prevention contractor who wasn’t present at the scene of the crime. The loss prevention contractor picked Williams as the best match to the security cameras. Without further investigation of Williams’ whereabouts in October 2018, Detroit Police arrested him and kept him in custody for 30 hours.

The lawsuit says Williams was only informed after several lines of questioning that he was there because of a match via facial recognition technology. As part of the settlement, which Williams reached in the summer of 2024, Detroit Police had to change the way it uses facial recognition technology. The city now observes some of the strictest uses of the technology across the country, which is legislated on a state-by-state basis.

Police can no longer go straight from facial recognition technology results to a witness identification procedure, and they cannot apply for an arrest warrant based solely on the results of a facial recognition technology database, Wessler said. Because there can be errors or biases in the technology, and by its users, guardrails are important to protect against false arrests, he said.

Emerging laws

At the start of 2025, 15 states — Washington, Oregon, Montana, Utah, Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois, Alabama, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine —  had some legislation around facial recognition in policing. Some states, like Montana and Utah, require a warrant for police to use facial recognition, while others, like New Jersey, say that defendants must be notified of its use in investigations.

At least seven more states are considering laws to clarify how and when the technology can be used — lawmakers in Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire and West Virginia have introduced legislation.

Like all AI technologies, facial recognition can have baked-in bias, or produced flawed responses. FRT has historically performed worse on groups of Black faces than on white, and has shown gender differences, too. AI is trained to get better over time, but people seem to think that simply by involving humans in the process, we’ll catch all the problems, Wessler said.

But humans actually tend to have something called “automation bias,” Wessler said — “this hardwired tendency of people to believe a computer output’s right as many times as you tell somebody the algorithm might get it wrong.”

So when police are relying on facial recognition technology as their primary investigative tool, instead of following older law enforcement practices, it’s “particularly insidious” when it goes wrong, Wessler said.

“I often say that this is a technology that is both dangerous when it works and dangerous when it doesn’t work,” Wessler said.

Kinsey said in her work with the Policing Project, she’s found bipartisan support for placing guardrails on police using this technology. Over multiple meetings with privacy advocates, police forces, lawmakers and academics, the Policing Project developed a legislative checklist.

It outlines how police departments could use the technology with transparency, testing and standards strategies, officer training, procedural limits and disclosure to those accused of crimes. It also says legislation should require vendors to disclose documentation about their FRT systems, and that legislation should provide ways to address violations of their use.

The Policing Project also makes similar recommendations for congressional consideration, and while Kinsey said she does believe federal guidelines are important, we may not see federal legislation passed any time soon. In the meantime, we’ll likely continue to see states influencing each other, and recent laws in Maryland and Virginia are an example of a broad approach to regulating FRT across different areas.

Kinsey said that in her meetings with police, they assert that the technologies are essential to crime solving. She said she believes there is space for FRT, and other technologies used by police like license plate readers and security cameras, but that doing so unfettered can do a lot of harm.

“We think some of them can absolutely provide benefits for solving crime, protecting victims,” Kinsey said. “But using those tools, using them according to rules that are public, transparent and have accountability, are not mutually exclusive goals. They can actually happen in concert.”

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com.

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