Sheriff Plans to Acquire Facial Recognition Technology

Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office vehicle in Sherman Park. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Despite significant public pushback to the idea, Milwaukee County Sheriff Denita Ball is planning to acquire facial recognition technology for the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO).

The sheriff has signed an agreement formally expressing her intention to enter into a contract with a firm called Biometrica that provides access to facial recognition technology.

The deal was first reported by Vanessa Swales, after Ball reportedly disclosed the existence of an agreement during a meeting of her community advisory board on Feb. 16. Ball’s chief of staff James Burnett confirmed for Urban Milwaukee that the sheriff has signed an “agreement of intent.”

The MCSO and Biometrica are still negotiating what would be a final contract to “use their services as an investigative tool,” he said. The contract is still in the “early drafting stage” and will still go through all the review and vetting requirements for county contracts, he said.

However, the contract would not need to be approved by the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors, because there would be no cost to the county associated with the contract. Biometrica offers its services to law enforcement agencies in exchange for millions of mugshots. The firm previously negotiated a deal with the Milwaukee Police Department to provide access to a facial recognition algorithm in exchange for 2.5 million mugshots.

The police department recently announced it had scuppered the use of facial recognition technology following significant pushback from the community, the Milwaukee Common Council and the Fire and Police Commission.

Urban Milwaukee asked the MCSO if the sheriff would similarly weigh public opinion when considering whether to implement the technology. The agency has not replied as of publishing.

A deal with Biometrica has been under consideration since at least June last year, when the MCSO informed the county board it was assessing a data-sharing agreement with Biometrica for facial recognition services. Since the disclosure, the community has overwhelmingly expressed opposition at public meetings to the MCSO acquiring and using facial recognition technology of any kind.

The MCSO wants to employ facial recognition technology to generate leads. Images of unidentified individuals suspected of a particular crime would be fed into the system, generating a list of probable matches, Chief Deputy Brian Barkow told supervisors in December. The agency would not connect the technology to camera feeds, use it to live-scan faces or surveil and track county residents, he said.

“So we get a sexual assault or a non-fatal shooting or a homicide that occurs, and we obtain video — could be from a church or a gas station across the street. We take that image and we run that image through this facial recognition software, and it comes back with a score of possible candidates as to who this, possibly, who this person is,” Barkow said.

The county board formally requested the county’s attorneys work with the county’s information technology officers and the MCSO to develop a facial recognition policy that protects civil liberties and minority communities. A draft policy was released in December. Organizations including the Milwaukee Turners, the ACLU of Wisconsin and the League of Women Voters criticized the draft.

The sheriff has broad authority under the state constitution and state law, but all county contracts — including those entered into by the MCSO — require the signature of the Milwaukee County Executive.

A spokesperson for County Executive David Crowley said he “is awaiting completion and approval” of the county facial recognition policy “before making any decisions,” and he has not signed any agreement with Biometrica.

“County Executive Crowley does not support technology that infringes on our residents’ First Amendment rights and is committed to continued conversations with the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office, [Office of Corporation Counsel], [Information Management Services Division] and other relevant stakeholders to ensure personal data and civil liberties are protected,” the spokesperson said.

Sup. Justin Bielinski, who chairs the board’s Committee on Judiciary, Law Enforcement and General Services, told Urban Milwaukee he “strongly disagrees” with the sheriff’s decision to sign an agreement with Biometrica.

“I think it’s kind of shocking that after the public outcry at the [county board] hearing in December and after the City of Milwaukee kind of reversed course… that they would still want to proceed,” Bielinski said.

The board’s options for responding to the potential facial recognition deal are unclear at this time, Bielinski said. “I certainly intend to do what I can — whatever lever is available to me — to stop this from going forward,” he said.

Bielinski is not confident the board could stop the deal by passing a new ordinance, he said, but the nature of the data-sharing agreement raises questions about whether it is already constrained by existing state laws or county ordinances governing how data is collected or shared.

Ball revealed the agreement of intent during a meeting of the advisory board she created. The 15-member advisory board was established in June last year. Ball appointed six members of the board and the rest were chosen by a selection committee that included local community leaders.

Ball moved to create the board after Bielinski began working to establish an MCSO citizen review board at the board level, one modeled on a citizen law enforcement board created in La Crosse in 2024.

Now that Ball has revealed her negotiations with Biometrica at an oversight body of her own making, Bielinski said it’s “another example of this citizens review board thing being a way to sort of subvert the [county board] committee process.”