Legislators in Massachusetts have approved a new measure for police reform, effectively prohibiting state and local law enforcement agencies from utilizing facial recognition technology.

The bill received approval from both the House and Senate on Tuesday, resolving a period of several months of stalled negotiations after key lawmakers reached a consensus.

Beyond the ban on facial recognition, the police reform legislation also outlaws the use of chokeholds and rubber bullets. It further restricts the deployment of chemical agents such as tear gas and empowers police officers to intervene should they witness another officer using excessive or unreasonable force. However, the bill maintains qualified immunity for police officers, a contentious point that protects them from legal repercussions for misconduct, due to opposition from law enforcement organizations.

This legislation was introduced in response to the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man killed by a white Minneapolis police officer who has since been charged with murder.

For years, concerns have been raised regarding the inaccuracies, biases, and disproportionate misidentification of individuals, particularly people of color, by facial recognition technology. The bill does include an exception allowing police to conduct facial recognition searches against the state’s driver license database, but only with a valid warrant. As part of this exception, the state is required to publicly release annual data detailing the number of searches conducted by law enforcement.

The Massachusetts Senate passed the bill by a vote of 28-12, while the House approved it 92-67. The legislation will now be forwarded to Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker for his consideration and signature.

Kade Crockford, leader of the Technology for Liberty program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, expressed strong support for the bill’s passage.

“Individuals should not live in fear of constant government surveillance through facial recognition, nor should they be subjected to wrongful arrests due to the flaws inherent in this biased and unreliable technology,” Crockford stated. “Over the past year, the ACLU of Massachusetts has collaborated with community groups and legislators throughout the state to prohibit facial surveillance in seven cities and towns, ranging from Boston to Springfield. We applaud the legislature for taking action to safeguard the privacy of all Massachusetts residents from unregulated facial surveillance technology.”

With limited action on federal privacy laws, restrictions on facial recognition technology are increasingly being enacted at the state and municipal levels. This fragmented approach allows for experimentation and the development of potential models for future legislation that can be adopted elsewhere.

Portland, Oregon, enacted a comprehensive ban on facial recognition technology in September. This ban, considered one of the most extensive in the country, prevents city agencies from using the technology and also prohibits private companies from deploying facial recognition systems in public areas. The ban was heightened by months of confrontations between protesters and law enforcement within the city.

Previous bans in cities like Oakland, San Francisco, and Boston focused on restricting the use of the technology by their respective city governments, but, similar to Massachusetts, did not extend those limitations to private companies. San Francisco’s ban, passed in May of last year, established the major technology center as the first large city to prohibit the use of facial recognition by city agencies and police departments.

Concurrently, as cities across the United States are working to limit the expansion of biometric surveillance, these same systems are being adopted at the federal level. In August, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) entered into a contract to access a facial recognition database created by Clearview AI, a company that has drawn significant controversy for collecting facial images from online sources, including social media platforms.

While much of the activism against facial recognition centers on local concerns, one state law has had a significant national impact. In Illinois, the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) has led to legal challenges against major technology companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet, for training facial recognition systems using the biometric data of Illinois residents without obtaining proper consent.

Updated with comment from the ACLU of Massachusetts.