The Honolulu Police Department’s (HPD) face recognition program was established in 2014 in conjunction with the Hawaii Criminal Justice Data Center (CJDC) (014704). In 2015, the system was expanded to all counties in Hawaii, and accesses a statewide database of mugshot photos. Driver’s license photos are not included in the database; Hawaii has determined that current statutes, rules, and regulations prohibit driver’s license and ID card photos from being included in the face recognition system (016846). African Americans are likely overrepresented in the database; they are arrested at a rate 111% higher than their share of Hawaii’s population.
HPD requires that police have reasonable suspicion to run a face recognition search, with an exception for “requests that come directly from the Chief” (016851). Searches are also permitted to identify deceased persons. It is unclear if police can run searches of bystanders or witnesses. Only staff who have completed face recognition training are permitted to access the system, and potential matches are manually reviewed by an analyst from the Crime Analysis Unit (014705, 014707). If no match is found in HPD’s system, a requester can send the image to the FBI to be run against its database of 24.9 million mugshots (014706). Hawaii signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the FBI in 2011 to participate in the NGI-IPS face recognition pilot.
HPD is one of four agencies we received responsive records from that has made its use policy public. CJDC stated it does not maintain audit records, and email correspondence with HPD indicates it maintains no records aside from the use policy, which suggests that no audits are conducted (015310, 016615). The HPD face recognition system uses a Morpho algorithm (016851).
Sources and Notes: HPD, CJDC, State of Hawaii Department of the Attorney General, U.S. Census (Last updated: September 2016). You can review our scorecard criteria in the Methodology section. Numerical citations, e.g. (123456), refer to official records available by clicking "View Documents" below.