- Oct 13, 2018
- BI2 Technologies Team
- IRIS™
- 0 Comments
CALDWELL — Joining more than 250 law enforcement agencies nationwide, the Canyon County Sheriff’s Office has become the first in Idaho to start using iris recognition, the sheriff’s office announced.
The iris recognition system takes a detailed photo of the inmate’s iris — the colored part of the eye — and stores it in a nationwide database with 1.4 million other entries.
“I’m proud to be the first sheriff’s office in Idaho to implement this innovative technology into our jail operations,” Canyon County Sheriff Kieran Donahue said in a prepared statement.
Iris recognition devices, however, have raised concerns about racial profiling. Deputies in other states’ counties use iris recognition while on patrol, not just in jails, spurring concern that officials will collect iris data not only for criminal history but also for citizenship information during stops.
“Especially Latinos or people of color are at greater risk for iris checks simply for the color of their skin,” Nathan Wessler, staff attorney with the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Intercept in July 2017.
The sheriff’s office plans to use the tool only within its jail operations, not on patrol, according to county spokesman Joe Decker. A response from Donahue about whether he was concerned the system would lead to racial profiling was not answered by press time.
Since Aug. 2, more than 1,560 inmates in Canyon County have been inputted into the iris identification database. That’s according to John Leonard, vice president of Biometric Intelligence and Identification Technologies, the Massachusetts company that created the Inmate Recognition and Identification System, known as the IRIS system.
Detention centers use the iris database to positively identify an inmate or prisoner within seconds. Canyon County is getting responses in 10.3 seconds, instead of what Leonard said could take up to a couple of days using fingerprints.
Using the IRIS system also leads to more accurate identification, Donahue said.
“Criminals of all types often provide false information or try to change their identities to avoid accurate identification and prosecution for crimes they have committed,” he stated. “This cutting-edge iris recognition software is another tool in our arsenal to help protect our citizens.”
Canyon County funded the roughly $10,000 system through a grant from the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program. The Bureau of Justice Assistance, under the U.S. Department of Justice, gives this grant to state or local governments that incur costs from the incarceration of “undocumented criminal aliens” with at least one felony or two misdemeanor convictions in a specified yearlong period, according to the grant.
In Canyon County, there’s been a rise in immigration holds, in which an inmate is held in the jail on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In 2017, ICE placed 48 immigration holds on Canyon County inmates; that number reached 47 in just the first half of this year.
In 2017, sheriffs in counties along the U.S.-Mexico border voted unanimously to use the IRIS system, according to The Intercept.
Biometric Intelligence and Identification Technologies offered a free three-year trial of the technology to each of the counties along the border. Leonard told The Intercept that the decision to donate the technology was partly “motivated by law enforcement’s alleged struggles with violent unauthorized immigrants.”
Article writing by EMILY LOWE elowe@idahopress.com