Dallas Police are considering a plan that would extend facial recognition searches to more routine offenses, expanding Clearview AI’s use beyond serious crimes.
The department wants to use the system for cases such as trespassing and package theft, moving biometric surveillance into investigations that previously relied on traditional methods.
The partnership with Clearview AI began in mid-2024. Since then, police have used the technology 156 times and say it has helped lead to 25 arrests. Officials described the tool as “vital” during a presentation to the Community Police Oversight Board.
If the new proposal moves forward, officers would be able to search Clearview’s massive online image database to identify suspects in minor cases.
The company’s system collects billions of photos from public websites and social media, creating a searchable map of faces taken from the open internet. This practice has drawn steady concern from those who see it as a quiet normalization of mass identification.
Dallas approved the use of facial recognition last spring after then Police Chief Eddie Garcia said the technology would revolutionize investigations.
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The city joined other North Texas departments already using similar tools, though officials emphasized that the delayed rollout allowed time to develop stricter internal safeguards meant to protect privacy.
Developed by Clearview AI, the program is only permitted for violent crimes or emergencies posing immediate threats to public safety. Each case must be approved before it can be analyzed by an FBI-trained specialist who runs the image through the system.
A second analyst independently reviews the matches before any lead moves forward. The department says that four requests have been denied either because the incident did not meet the system’s severity threshold or lacked proper authorization.
Council member Cara Mendelsohn expressed confidence when the tool was first adopted. “I have always had a lot of concerns about privacy, whether it is data or other things. This feels very comfortable for me. This feels like efficiency and just the next step,” she said at the time.
Only weeks earlier, the company agreed to settle a US lawsuit that consolidated privacy complaints from several states. The Illinois-based case alleged that Clearview’s method of collecting and cataloging people’s faces without consent breached biometric privacy protections. The settlement could cost as much as $50 million.
For Dallas, the technology’s promise of faster investigations coexists with the possibility of deeper surveillance. As city leaders weigh efficiency against autonomy, the underlying question remains whether any system built on billions of scraped faces can ever be compatible with true personal privacy.
