Reconhecendo faces, enclasurando corpos terror racial, vigilância racializadora e o uso policial do reconhecimento facial na Bahia

Abstract

This work consists of a reflexive exploration through racial lenses on the use of facial recognition by Bahia state police from December/2018. Our starting point was the premise that the penal system and the practices of surveillance and repression have racism as a political guide of its activities, resulting in racial terror, as a set of violent politics and that seek to reaffirm racial borders and hierarchies. Using the framework of "racializing surveillance" by Simone Browne, we alert to a historical pattern of technologies for the construction, maintenance, and revalidation of the sign "negro" as an element to be depoliated and explored, highlighting the role of biometric technologies, those that allow the identification of the subject by body elements. In this sense, we point to facial recognition as part of this logic, something also expressed in algorithmic injustices involving technology due to racial biases. We demonstrate through documentary research how police use of facial recognition is expanding in Brazil and generates violations of rights such as privacy, data protection, freedom, right of assembly, among others. We highlight the way this system disproportionately affects Black people due to the encounter between racial biases in technology and the historical pattern of the Brazilian penal system. From this historical contextualization, information collection about the system and qualitative analysis of the captures made with the biometric tool, it was possible to produce an overview of the use of facial recognition in Bahia with racial lens of analysis engaged by a radical critical thinking of the penal system. In this sense, our goal was to demonstrate how facial recognition arrives to update racial terror with the use of video monitoring technologies.