Policing Project Faculty Director and Founder Barry Friedman recently traveled to Brussels, Belgium where he co-hosted the round-table discussion “Using Facial Recognition in Law Enforcement” at the Microsoft Brussels Center. In his latest op-ed for Just Security, Professor Friedman examines the differences between the U.S. and European approaches to regulating facial recognition, as well as the urgent need for increase action in this space.

Coming to Europe from the United States to talk about law enforcement use of facial recognition (FRT) at multi-stakeholder gatherings is like walking through the looking glass. It’s not clear exactly what metaphor fits best. Where Europeans have a lush forest of legal regulations for police use of technology and data—and still feel they are lacking what they need—in the United States, we live in a desert landscape bereft of laws where police do what they wish with virtually no regulation at all.

To be clear—and much more on this below—there’s every reason to be skeptical of some of the legal justifications offered for FRT particularly in the United Kingdom. And some of those countries may be moving too quickly, beyond even where police in the United States tread. But that, in its own way, is the point: there are legal justifications required, and given, and people know them, and can call them out as insufficient if they just don’t measure up. In the United States, it is all hush-hush, maybe even with a dose of deceiving the public mixed in, making it nearly impossible to hold law enforcement to account.

Read the full piece, “Law Enforcement’s Facial Recognition Law-lessness: Comparing European and US Approaches.”