Rep. Rashida Tlaib and the Detroit chief of police clashed this week after she told him during a tour that he should hire only black people as analysts to operate his department's facial recognition software, claiming that people who are not black think all people who are black look alike.
"Analysts need to be African-Americans, not people that are not," the Michigan Democrat told Police Chief James Craig during a tour of the city's Real Time Crime Center, where the software is used to find suspects, reports Fox News. "It’s true, I think non-African-Americans think African-Americans all look the same!"
The department had invited Tlaib to tour the system in August after she called facial recognition technology "bulls**t" on Twitter.
Tlaib claimed that she's seen people confuse Reps. John Lewis, D-Ga., and Elijah Cummings, D-Md., who are both black and bald.
Craig, who is black, rejected her suggestion and told the freshman congresswoman that he trusts "people who are trained, regardless of race, regardless of gender."
Tlaib's comments came after she claimed that the machine's "error rate, among African-Americans, especially women," is 60% and told Craig to "see if you can get some of our money back until they fix it."
The tour had gotten off to a rough start when Tlaib asked a reporter with The Detroit News, who was recording the event if he was "facial recognizing" her and wanted to know why she was being videotaped.
After the tour, the reporter asked Tlaib if her comments meant that white people are not qualified to run the software. She responded that there has "actually been studies out that it's hard for, you know, like African-Americans would identify African-Americans, similar, Latino, same thing."
He then asked Tlaib if that means African-Americans should not be allowed to identify white people, and she told him to "look it up" and walked away.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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