California law-enforcement agencies will be barred from using facial recognition technology for three years, under a new state law beginning Jan. 1, and some police officials fear the ban will jeopardize public safety.
"Here was technology working at a quicker pace for us to make sure we identified people correctly to get our officers back on the streets quicker to patrol and keep our community safe," Roxana Kennedy, police chief of Chula Vista, Calif., told The San Diego Union-Tribune.
But others argue the technology continues to evolve — and the ban will allow for further improvements.
"Facial recognition is still developing, so it hasn't gotten to the point where law enforcement is fully dependent on it," said Lt. Justin White of the San Diego County Sheriff's Department. "We still have traditional ways of doing police work and identifying people.
"Facial recognition obviously makes things faster and can narrow down the scope faster than traditional ways, but it's not the end-all of identifying people."
Signed into law in October, California State Assembly bill 1215 prohibits officers and deputies from using cameras for facial recognition and biometric surveillance.
It comes as use of the technology —along with such biometric as fingerprints, retinal scans and DNA — is raising privacy and civil rights concerns on how information is collected, stored and used in surveillance, the Union-Tribune reports.
In San Diego County, the three-year ban affects the Tactical Identification System (TACIDS), a large regional database managed by the San Diego Association of Governments.
It contains as many as 1.8 million booking photos, according to the report, and is used by about 30 law enforcement agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol.
Within two weeks after Newsom signed legislation creating the new law, the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked the regional agency to "begin the process immediately to suspend this fatally flawed program that threatens the civil liberties of people in California."
"This is huge news that they are shutting it down," Dave Maass, a senior foundation investigator who wrote the letter, told the Union-Tribune.
"San Diego has one of the longest-running face-recognition programs, it’s one of the most expansive, with 25,000 scans a year.
"While we have seen bans on and moratoriums on facial recognition, it may be the only time a face-recognition program of this size and scale was so abruptly shut down," he said.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.