"Eyes on the poor: Cameras, facial recognition watch over public housing", 16 May 2023

...In public housing facilities across America, local officials are installing a new generation of powerful and pervasive surveillance systems, imposing an outsize level of scrutiny on some of the nation’s poorest citizens. Housing agencies have been purchasing the tools — some equipped with facial recognition and other artificial intelligence capabilities — with no guidance or limits on their use, though the risks are poorly understood and little evidence exists that they make communities safer...

...In tiny Rolette, N.D., public housing officials have installed 107 cameras to watch up to 100 residents — a number of cameras per capita approaching that found in New York’s Rikers Island jail complex...The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has helped facilitate the purchase of cameras through federal crime-fighting grants. Those grants are meant to keep residents safer, and housing agencies say they do. But the cameras are also being used to generate evidence to punish and evict public housing residents, sometimes for minor violations of housing rules, according to interviews with residents and legal aid attorneys, a review of court records, and interviews and correspondence with administrators at more than 60 public housing agencies that received the grants in 27 states...

...No data is available on how often the cameras are used for this purpose. But the previously unreported practice highlights how efforts to make public housing safer are subjecting many of the 1.6 million Americans who live there — overwhelmingly people of color — to round-the-clock surveillance...

...A 2019 study of facial recognition systems found that Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than White men... Brandon Davito, vice president of product at Verkada, said the company’s own testing found that its facial recognition system accurately matched more than 99 percent of faces...

Douglas MacMillan, The Washington Post