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Cops Used DNA to Predict a Suspect’s Face—and Tried to Run Facial Recognition on It
Leaked records reveal what appears to be the first known instance of a police department attempting to use facial recognition on a face generated from crime-scene DNA. It likely won’t be the last.
According to a 2020 article in Nature, the DOD was initially interested in developing phenotyping technology to re-create the faces of people who made improvised explosive devices, using traces of DNA left on the bomb fragments. Haley Williams, a communications manager with the Boise Police Department in Idaho, tells WIRED in an email that the decision to use facial recognition with an algorithmically generated face would be made on a “case-by-case” basis. “Because modern facial recognition algorithms are trained neural networks, we just don’t know exactly what criteria the systems use to identify a face,” Garvie, who now works at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, tells WIRED.
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