While on a tour of the Detroit Police Department’s Public Safety headquarters, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) told police chief James Craig that he should only hire black employees for the role of facial recognition analysts, as the New York Post reports.
When the congresswoman was being shown the department’s video surveillance facility, Tlaib was filmed laughing and telling Craig that he should only hire African-Americans for the role of facial recognition analysts, saying that “non-African-Americans think African-Americans all look the same…analysts need to be African-Americans, not people that are not.”
Craig, who is himself an African-American, later stated that her comments were “insulting,” and were like “a slap in the face to all the men and women in the crime center.” He appeared on Fox News to clarify that the facial recognition process is mostly done by the computer software, and has little to do with the actual analyst or their skin color; he said that he and other officers tried to explain this to Tlaib, but she wouldn’t listen.
Tlaib had previously criticized the Detroit PD in a tweet in August, saying that the department “should probably rethink this whole facial recognition bulls**t.”