On February 15, Amnesty International published a report exposing how the New York Police Department has constructed a vast metropolis-spanning surveillance network heavily reliant on highly controversial facial recognition technology (FRT), which serves to “reinforce discriminatory policing against minority communities.”

Once a science fiction staple, the Orwellian technology is quickly becoming normalized, wholeheartedly embraced by police forces up and down the nation. FRT allows police to compare CCTV imagery and other sources with traditional photographic records, as well as databases of billions of headshots, some of which are crudely pulled from individuals’ social media profiles without their knowledge or consent. The NYPD is a particularly enthusiastic user – or, perhaps, abuser – of FRT, with 25,500 cameras spanning the city today.

There is also a clear racial component to FRT deployment in New York – Amnesty found that in areas where the proportion of non-white residents is higher, so too is the concentration of FRT-equipped CCTV cameras. As such, the organization argues it has supplanted traditional ‘stop-and-frisk’ operations by law enforcement.