Records show the Los Angeles Police Department has used facial recognition software ~30,000 times since 2009, and 300+ personnel have access to the tools
Context & Ripple Effects
The records land in a decade-long arc: back in 2015, the EFF documented California officers running facial recognition from field biometric devices, so in-the-field biometrics were already normalized well before this disclosure. What is new is the scale — roughly 30,000 searches by one department, spread across a pool of 300+ personnel rather than a specialized unit, which makes centralized oversight structurally difficult.
Two months later, under press scrutiny of its use of Clearview AI, the LAPD issued a moratorium on commercial facial recognition software — an about-face the Times' records help explain. And later national reporting showed the stakes: departments across 15 states had built cases on facial-recognition leads alone and routinely failed to tell defendants the software was involved.
First-order effects
- LAPD leadership must account for how 300+ badge-holders came to have standing access to search tools, and whether any of those ~30,000 queries fed arrests made without corroborating evidence — the pattern Washington Post later documented elsewhere.
Second-order effects
- Press scrutiny of vendor relationships directly forces policy reversals: BuzzFeed's Clearview inquiries preceded the LAPD's commercial-software moratorium, and BuzzFeed's subsequent leak showing 1,803 taxpayer-funded orgs on Clearview put every other department's informal usage under the same pressure.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the binding constraint on police facial recognition becomes procedural rather than technological — courts and defense advocates demanding disclosure of algorithmic involvement in arrests, as the 12-state investigation of evidence-free identification suggests is already happening.
The trend: Police facial recognition is scaling from niche forensic tooling to routine, widely-distributed practice years before disclosure rules or oversight mechanisms catch up.