How some police departments in the US conduct facial recognition searches on behalf of other jurisdictions, boosting access to the tech and evading local laws
“Do not mention FITlist.” — ver the last decade, large police forces in Washington state like the Seattle Police Department … Tweets: @dlberes , @michaelhayes , @privacyproject , and @mvzelenks . Thanks: @davegershgorn Tweets: Damon Beres / @dlberes : Scoopy: “Now, thanks to thousands of pages of previously undisclosed emails, OneZero can confirm the existence of a massive, secretive network of police departments working together to share... controversial facial recognition tools.” https://rsci.app.link/... Mike Hayes / @michaelhayes : New story on @ozm: Thousands of pages of previously undisclosed emails reveal a secretive network of police departments in Washington state working together to share controversial facial recognition tools https://onezero.medium.com/... @privacyproject : “Officers on the listserv are encouraged to adopt a Fight Club-style directive that precludes group members from discussing the existence of the list publicly,” writes @michaelhayes in @ozm https://onezero.medium.com/... Michael Zelenko / @mvzelenks : So @michaelhayes got his hands on thousands of pages of documents outlining a secret email chain used by WA police to coordinate facial recognition searches Secret Emails Reveal How Washington State Cops Shared Facial Recognition Tech by @michaelhayes https://onezero.medium.com/... Thanks: @davegershgorn
Context & Ripple Effects
OneZero's document trove shows that when cities moved to restrict facial recognition, the technology didn't disappear — it went underground. Large Washington state forces like the Seattle Police Department began running searches on behalf of other jurisdictions, a pattern that echoes the earlier FOIA revelation that cities adopted Amazon Rekognition without any public debate. The FITlist reference in the reporting suggests a formalized directory behind the sharing, not ad hoc favors.
This matters because local ordinances — the main regulatory tool cities have used — only bind the department that passes them. The same dynamic resurfaced years later when New Orleans police ran a secret network of 200+ facial recognition cameras despite a 2022 city ordinance, and when investigators found departments making arrests based on facial recognition matches alone. The Washington state network is the earliest documented case of jurisdiction-hopping as a workaround.
First-order effects
- Jurisdictions that banned or restricted facial recognition lose that protection immediately: their residents' faces can still be searched by a partner department acting as a proxy, with no legal hook back to the local law.
- The Seattle Police Department and similar large Washington forces effectively become facial-recognition service bureaus, absorbing other agencies' searches — and their liability and oversight obligations — into their own systems.
Second-order effects
- Civil rights groups and city councils face a drafting problem: a local ordinance is only as strong as the weakest neighbor's policy, so pressure shifts toward county- and state-level rules that no single department can route around.
- Vendors of networked policing tools gain a structural tailwind — the Fusus model of merging public and private cameras across 60+ cities shows the same interconnection logic being productized, making proxy searches easier and harder to trace.
Third-order effects
- If interdepartmental sharing keeps outpacing local law, effective governance of facial recognition migrates from city ordinances to state legislatures and Congress, since only higher-level rules can bind the network rather than its nodes.
- The pathway from a proxy search to a suspect's arrest — documented later in the multi-state investigation of facial-recognition-only arrests — points toward courts and regulators having to define evidentiary standards for a technology whose use was never publicly authorized in the first place.
The trend: Local facial recognition restrictions are being routed around through interdepartmental sharing networks, pushing the real regulatory fight up from city councils to statehouses and federal lawmakers.