Firm Targeted MA Police Departments For Facial Recognition Tech

BOSTON — A company that lists billionaire Mark Cuban among its investors tried to convince police departments in Massachusetts to install its facial recognition technology in police station lobbies, according to emails released by the American Civil Liberties Union. Suspect Technologies promised police departments "Real Time Person Detection" that could track people across time and space. The company also wanted to access driver's license photos from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicle Database to test the accuracy of its system.

According to VICE, which first reported this story, Plymouth Police Chief Michael Botieri and former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis were among the police officials contacted by Suspect Technologies. "If I tried to implement this system in Boston I would be run out of town by the liberal activists and privacy zealots, to say nothing of the Boston Globe and their advocacy for undocumented immigrants," Davis said in one email chain discussing the possibility of installing the facial recognition system in the lobbies of police stations in Boston.

In one pitch to police departments, Jacob Sniff, a co-founder of Suspect Technologies, outlined the advantages of using the company's "Real Time Person Detection." The system could be used to "show where all people are" during active shooter situations, abduction cases and "the events you monitor." Another feature uses historical data to "show where all people have been in past X minutes."

Sniff asked Botieri, who declined comment, to vouch for the company on grant applications. He also sent Botieri a link to an article on the Parkland, Florida, school shooting in 2018. "Don’t you see how facial alerts could be pretty valuable at main entrances?" Sniff wrote.

The RMV does not provide access to its data to third-party companies, so Sniff tried to gain access by asking the police departments that had shown interest in the company's products. "Could we reasonably gain access to MA RMB [RMV] databases or other similar databases in MA?" Sniff asked Botieri. "I know we discussed this at meeting [sic] and the consensus was yes. I guess I’m wondering how long would this take?"

Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, invested in the company and led a funding round of $810,000. He has used the technology in the basketball team's locker room. But he told VICE he does not have any say in the company's day-to-day operations and assumed Sniff wanted access to the RMV records to "train" its facial recognition technology.

The VICE article does not make clear if any Massachusetts police departments have contracted with Suspect Technologies or granted it access to RMV records. Sniff told VICE it has one official client and a number of beta testers for the facial recognition product. "We're still trying there," he said of efforts to get Plymouth police to adopt the technology.

For more on this story, see VICE.

Dave Copeland can be reached at dave.copeland@patch.com or by calling 617-433-7851. Follow him on Twitter (@CopeWrites) and Facebook (/copewrites).