A Senate panel unanimously advanced a bill Wednesday that seeks to restrict the use of facial recognition technology in Colorado’s government, law enforcement and schools.

If enacted, Senate Bill 113 would establish several limitations and regulations for the use of artificial intelligence facial recognition services by government agencies and law enforcement agencies in the state. The bill would also completely prohibit the use of facial recognition technology in public and charter schools until 2025. 

Bill sponsor Sen. Chris Hansen, D-Denver, said the legislation aims to slow down and reevaluate the state’s use of facial recognition technology due to disproportionate identification issues for people of color.

“There’s certainly a lot of great things that this technology can do and does do for us … but there’s also some real downsides,” Hansen said. “It’s not a bill that’s designed to stop progress or reduce the proper use of this technology, but it’s for us to think carefully about how we’re applying it, especially in the public setting and with law enforcement.”

Multiple studies have found a racial bias in facial recognition technology. For dark-skinned women, the technology had an error rate of 34.7%, compared to 0.8% for fair-skinned men, according to a 2018 study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Similarly, a federal study in 2019 found that Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely than white men to be misidentified by facial recognition technology.

While panel members unanimously supported the bill Wednesday, some people spoke in opposition during the meeting’s public testimony. Most of the opposition came from members of law enforcement. 

“These proven and ever improving technologies allow peace officers investigating criminal incidents to reduce crime and to protect civil liberties by focusing their efforts only on persons with much greater likelihood of involvement,” said David Shipley, executive director of the Colorado Information Sharing Consortium, which is comprised of 86 Colorado law enforcement agencies.

Under the bill, law enforcement agencies would be prohibited from using facial recognition technology to establish probable cause, identify an individual from a police sketch or create a record depicting an individual’s actions protected by the First Amendment. Law enforcement agencies would also need special permission to use facial recognition to conduct surveillance, tracking or real-time identification.

Government agencies using facial recognition technology would have to notify a reporting authority, specify why the technology is being used, produce an accountability report, test the equipment and subject any decisions that result from the technology to human review.

The County Sheriffs of Colorado and Security Industry Association also spoke against the bill, with the latter criticizing its temporary prohibition of facial recognition technology in schools.

“There’s no justification for the ban on use in schools. This could prohibit some potentially life-saving security applications,” said Jake Parker, director of government relations for the association. Parker said facial recognition technology is used by schools to screen visitors against a list of people prohibited from entering school grounds and could help prevent shootings.

The bill would also create a task force, which will operate through September 2032 and will be responsible for studying issues related to the use of artificial intelligence. The task force’s findings would be used to help inform the use of facial recognition technology in schools after the bill’s ban ends in 2025, Hansen said.

While it is unclear whether any Colorado schools currently use facial recognition technology, nationally, public schools have used the technology for discipline, such as by identifying students seen skipping class or breaking rules in security footage.

Several experts in the technology industry testified in support of the bill Wednesday, including multiple people from the University of Colorado’s artificial intelligence program. 

“Facial recognition is being used in our schools and in our communities, almost always with good intent, but certainly not always with good results and sometimes even with harmful ones,” said Christine Chang, computer science PhD student at the university. “I’d like to remind you of Robert Williams, Michael Oliver and Nijeer Parks, all of whom were wrongfully arrested based on conclusions drawn from investigative leads provided by facial recognition software.”

Because of these issues, cities such as San Francisco, Boston and Portland have banned the use of facial recognition technology by police and local agencies. The proposed Colorado bill would not ban the technology, but it would establish strict limitations.

University of Colorado law professor Margot Kaminski, who has a background in comparative law of artificial intelligence, said the proposed bill would be a “gold standard” for handling facial recognition technology. 

“The use of (artificial intelligence), especially by government, produces well-known risks,” Kaminski said. “Risks of error, risks of bias and discrimination, and also considerable harms to personal freedom, including such things as monitoring protestors, incentives for building surveillance infrastructure or for co-opting private surveillance systems for law enforcement use.”