Facial recognition isn't that different from fingerprints or DNA traces. It's a comparison against a database of biometric data. It used to be that law enforce

Facial recognition isn't that different from fingerprints or DNA traces. It's a comparison against a database of biometric data. It used to be that law enforcement relied on fingerprints, eye-witnesses or a video tape backed by a judicial and legal system that - more or less - severely limited how and when that information could be collected and used e.g. within the context of discrete on-going criminal investigations. This balance has been shifting entirely over the few short years. Now, video camera's, fingerprinting and so on are collected pre-emptively; on literally everyone. Undeniably, it's easier to move forward on an investigation if you already have a lot of the data at hand. The argument put forward by proponents is that speeding up investigations saves lives. But that comes with a ton of hard problems. First, searching accurately through a vast mountain of diffuse information is a hard problem. Law enforcement has outsourced that part to private companies, which opens up a can of worms in terms of confidentiality and privacy. Second, searching through such a database becomes a black box as far as law enforcement is concerned: just upload a picture or a video fragment and it will easily yield any result. The fallacy being that convenience lulls LE into assuming that the results are accurate enough at face value. No need for verification or critical thinking (Much like you'd accept the results yielded by Google Search at face value). Third, it's a convenient way to offshore responsibility towards the public. Law enforcement didn't make the wrong assertion if the wrong person ends up getting prosecuted and convicted: the data was just "not good enough". The fallacy here is that data gets treated as a commodity, which it is anything but. Fourth, there's a difference between what's morally right and what's legal. The latter changes depending on how defines public governance. A database may be a great idea, until control is ceded to someone who uses that data against the public. There's actually a historic precedent here: the 1943 bombing of the Amsterdam Civil Registry office. Following the 1940 German invasion of the Netherlands, all Dutch Jews had to carry a mandatory identity card and there whereabouts were recorded centrally at the Civil Registry. This was easy as, prior to the war, people's religious denomination had been recorded. The Dutch Resistance understood the importance and the downsides of a centralised record containing private information falling into the wrong hands. And so, they ended up attacking and demolishing the Civil Registry office containing that record. Albeit half-successful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_bombing_of_the_Amsterdam_civil_registry_office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_bombing_of_the_Amsterdam_... Obviously, I don't advocate attacking datacenters - that would be an effort in futility anyway - but your assertion that investing in mental health support would be more helpful rings very much true.