All New Mexicans deserve to live their daily lives free from government surveillance and wrongful arrests. Instead of adopting facial recognition technology that threatens civil rights and privacy, we need clear legal protections that ensure both public safety and constitutional freedoms.
Facial recognition shows alarming racial and gender bias.
Government testing shows these systems are up to 100 times more likely to misidentify Asian and African American people compared to white men, and that women and younger individuals were also subject to disparately high misidentification rates. In cities tracking facial recognition use, the data reveals severe racial targeting - in Detroit, every single facial recognition search in 2020 was conducted on images of Black people.
The technology leads to devastating wrongful arrests.
Across the country, innocent people have been arrested based on false facial recognition matches - nearly all of them Black. Even a short time in jail can result in job loss, family separation, damaged credit reports, and lasting trauma.
Mass surveillance threatens fundamental rights.
When used with video feeds, facial recognition gives police unprecedented power to track anyone's movements across time and location. This technology can identify and monitor individuals and groups of people at protests, religious gatherings, medical clinics, or simply going about their daily lives.
This technology is dangerous whether it works or fails.
Facial recognition either misidentifies innocent people leading to wrongful arrests, or it works as intended enabling mass surveillance that violates privacy and chills free speech. There is no acceptable middle ground.
New Mexico must ban this technology.
Over 20 jurisdictions have already enacted laws stopping government use of facial recognition. The New Mexico legislature must act now to protect civil rights and ban this dangerous technology.
