Surveillance tools used by the Minneapolis Police Department

The Minneapolis Police Department has a wide breadth of surveillance technologies which could be used to monitor and target protestors — including controversial facial recognition software Clearview AI, license plate readers, body cameras, and analysis tools. The department, and law enforcement in neighboring cities, have a history of using technology to surveil residents and possibly speed up the process of identifying and arresting people.

After police killed an unarmed black man in Minneapolis and an unarmed black woman in Louisville, protests have broken out across the United States — including in Minneapolis, Denver, Columbus, and New York — expressing grief and outrage, and demanding an end to police brutality.

The center of these protests has been Minneapolis, where a white cop killed George Floyd on May 25 while he was in police custody by pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck. The moments before his death, which were captured on camera, showed Floyd struggling to breathe, repeatedly telling police “I can’t breathe” and “they’re going to kill me.”

The Minneapolis Police Department has used a wide breadth of surveillance technologies which could be used to target and surveil these protestors captured on camera — including Clearview AI, which scraped billions of photos from social media to power its facial recognition tool. Nearby police departments have also used Clearview AI, as well as the Hennepin County Sheriff and the Minnesota Fusion Center, jurisdictions that overlay Minneapolis.

“At a high level, these surveillance technologies should not be used on protestors,” Neema Singh Guiliani, a senior legislative counsel for the ACLU, told BuzzFeed News. “The idea that you have groups of people that are raising legitimate concerns and now that could be subject to face recognition or surveillance, simply because they choose to protest, amplifies the overall concerns with law enforcement having this technology to begin with.”

According to documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News, more than 10 users with the Minneapolis PD had run more than 160 searches as of February. The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office, which oversees the county that includes Minneapolis, had also run nearly 400 searches among 10 accounts. And the Minnesota Fusion Center, a specialized section of the state-run Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), had run almost 40 searches as of February.

The Minneapolis Police Department, the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office, and Minnesota Fusion Center did not respond to requests for comment.

The neighboring St. Paul Police Department had run nearly 40 searches, as of February. And the police department of Prior Lake, Minnesota, a suburb about 20 miles southwest of Minneapolis, racked up more than 1,100 searches between July and February with three Clearview accounts.

The St. Paul PD and the Prior Lake PD did not respond to requests for comment.

The Minneapolis PD has not been forthcoming about its use of facial recognition. In July, a spokesperson for the Minneapolis Police Department told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that the organization had no plans to deploy the technology, but. at least one user associated with the Minneapolis PD created an account with Clearview AI that month, according to data seen by BuzzFeed News.

Records obtained by local journalist Tony Webster showed that the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office has deployed facial recognition since 2013. The sheriff's office ran a suspect’s photo taken from Instagram through a facial recognition tool to reveal a possible match in a July 2019 case, as reported by the Star-Tribune. It’s unclear if this facial recognition tool was offered by Clearview, or another company.

The Minneapolis PD also uses a wide range of other surveillance tools. In a 2019 white paper, the department said that it used automatic license plate readers, or cameras that capture images of license plates as vehicles travel throughout the city, allowing police to potentially track the movement of a person throughout a city or region. In 2009, the city paid Tennessee-based traffic camera company PIPS Technology more than $50,000 for both fixed and mobile license plate readers.

Additionally, according to new receipts obtained by BuzzFeed News via public record request, the neighboring Prior Lake PD has paid thousands of dollars for thousands for Thomson Reuters CLEAR — a law enforcement data aggregation tool that has also been used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — from October 2016 through at least September 2019. CLEAR combines data from cell phones, license plate readers, and real-time arrest records. In aggregate, this data makes it faster and easier for police track and arrest suspects.

The Minneapolis PD also uses Securonet, a surveillance tool that lets police upload cellphone footage, integrate it with CCTV footage, and visualize it on a map. The police department started using Securonet in 2017, ahead of hosting the 2018 Super Bowl. The police department signed another contract with Securonet in 2019.

This year, Minneapolis started using BriefCam, a high-definition surveillance camera system used throughout the city’s rail, bus, and metro system. The Minneapolis PD said in the white paper that it doesn’t currently combine surveillance cameras with real-time or automated facial recognition, but noted that “it is conceivable that this could change in the near future.”

Rich Neumeister, a Minneapolis resident, submitted written testimony to the city subcommittee on data practice on January 30 urging the city to enact restrictions on the use of facial recognition. At the time of writing, no restrictions existed.

“There needs to be guardrails, standards, and curtailing policies so that the use and rules are not developed by law enforcement agencies in secret,” he said. “Our privacy and civil liberties can be diminished if this onerous and powerful technology is not kept in check.”

The Minneapolis PD also has a 5-year contract with police body camera Axon, which lasts through 2021. The agreement involves providing body cameras to all 888 sworn police officers in the city. The police department received a grant from the Department of Homeland Security in 2018 to help pay for these cameras.

Minenapolis also hosts an array of CCTV cameras, which the police can access. The Minneapolis PD said in a surveillance white paper that it uses Milestone Software from Arxys — a video management tool that claims to offer "video motion detection" and "video analytics" — to analyze CCTV footage.

The Minneapolis PD has also paid more than $2 million for Shotspotter, an audio surveillance tool that listens for gunshots and visualizes possible shooting locations on a map. There’s no evidence, as of right now, that Shotspotter effectively reduces crime and makes cities “safer,” which the company claims.

As noted in a surveillance white paper, police departments operating in Minneapolis, like the state-run Minnesota BCA, have access to more surveillance tools. For instance, the Minnesota BCA has access to Stingrays, a tool that mimics cell phone towers in order to approximate the location of cellphone users. Stingrays have allegedly been used to target Black Lives Matter protestors.

Additionally, several local police departments in the Minneapolis metro area — including The Spring Lake Park PD, Brooklyn Center PD, the Plymouth PD, Saint Louis Park PD, and Edina PD — have signed contracts with Ring, Amazon’s home surveillance company, according to the company’s map of active partnerships. Ring contracts give police access to the company’s law enforcement portal, which lets police request camera footage from residents without obtaining a warrant first. In exchange, Ring has given police free cameras, and it has offered police more free cameras if they convince enough people to download its neighborhood watch app, Neighbors.

Saira Hussain, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told BuzzFeed News that the pervasiveness of surveillance technology could mean that protesters face the risk of arrest far after protests end.

“It’s important to know what types of risks there are when risks, and knowing that the risks might not just be in the moment,” Hussain said, “but also thereafter, because of all this immense amount of surveillance technology.”

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