AI, facial recognition security camera systems coming to Arizona schools

Several school districts across Arizona are planning to begin using artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology in their security cameras this school year, hoping it will improve school safety.

School leaders said they plan to use the technology to alert administrators to the presence of registered sex offenders and search for footage of specific students when investigating disciplinary incidents. Privacy and free speech advocates, however, warn of the technology's potential chilling effect on students.

This summer, the Baboquivari Unified School District purchased security cameras with AI features using $500,000 from a federal grant and nearly $400,000 in additional district funds. The district serves more than 1,000 students in rural Pima County and covers much of the Tohono O’odham Nation. Its boundary goes up to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Those AI features can detect the presence of faces, filter video by people's gender and the color of clothing and monitor license plates, according to a policy adopted by the district’s governing board.

They can also track individuals using facial recognition technology, which identifies people by analyzing and comparing their facial features to existing images.

If there's a report that a student "just walked out of a specific place and he looks suspicious, we can say, 'Follow this student from this time to this time,' and we’ll get the footage of that particular student," Superintendent Ruben Diaz said. He added that they would do the same for a person who "gets into the school" who is not supposed to be there.

The cameras have yet to arrive, and Diaz said he doesn't have all the details yet about the technology's capabilities.

But from what the security camera company has told him so far, he hopes to use the technology to alert administrators to irregular behavior or student crowds and to help investigate incidents more quickly by creating timelines using facial recognition.

"When there's an altercation between students, there's always the question of who started it," Diaz said. He thinks facial recognition will allow the district to search for and watch previous incidents between students "to determine who is a perpetrator and who is a victim."

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In May, there were two incidents of fighting and seven drug violations in the district's high school, which serves about 240 students, Diaz said.

Unauthorized people also entered a Baboquivari Unified school building twice last year, saying they were looking for water and food, and were removed by Border Patrol officials. Diaz doesn't think security cameras can prevent incidents of unauthorized individuals coming onto campus, though.

If someone has "poor intentions," the new technology won't prevent them from entering a site, he said. "This is more a part of the solution once they enter," he said. The district plans to share live video feeds with law enforcement during emergencies, Diaz said.

Diaz said he hopes the technology will make students feel safer at school.

Even when no adult is present, students will know that does not mean that they're "not being watched," he said. For students who are being bullied or are victims in some way, "they can see that at least someone is watching, protecting them as well," he said.

Not everyone in district leadership agreed on the AI-powered surveillance plan.

Board member Annamarie Stevens shared concerns about student information and safety. “We are surveilled all the time, being in this area in southern Arizona, being on the Tohono O’odham Nation, dealing with Border Patrol — it doesn’t sit well,” Stevens said.

Juan Buendia, the board president, voiced concerns over who could access student information. An Arizona Auditor General report, published in late July, found the district had "not complied with important IT security requirements and recommended practices." The district agreed with the audit's findings and agreed to implement the auditor's guidance.

Despite some board members’ hesitations, Baboquivari Unified plans to roll out the cameras this school year.

A policy adopted by the board in June outlined who would have access to the recordings — a number of specific district administrators — and established a requirement that anyone requesting access to video recordings would have to make a request to the superintendent.

Footage would be automatically deleted after 30 days, according to the policy, and videos used for student discipline would be considered an educational record under federal law. If a law enforcement agency requested to view video for investigation purposes, the faces of the individuals not involved would be blurred, Diaz said. He added that the manufacturer will only have access to security footage during the installation process.

The Piñon Unified School District in northeastern Arizona on the Navajo Nation also recently purchased cameras with facial recognition and vehicle identification technology, which the district’s security director, Tully Begay, said would be used to input the faces and license plates of registered sex offenders in the area so that visitors could be monitored and administrators alerted. Those cameras will be used for school events, too — they’ll be placed near the entrances to football games. There haven't been any incidents of registered sex offenders coming onto campus, according to Begay. "We just want to be on the safe side," he said.

And this summer, the East Valley’s Higley Unified School District spent more than $330,000 on new security cameras and equipment with AI capabilities and facial recognition.

A spokesperson for the district said the cameras replaced an outdated system and referred questions about the system's AI technology integration to the camera company, Verkada. The facial recognition features are turned off by default and must be enabled by an administrator, according to a Verkada spokesperson, who added that the company has nearly 200 school clients in Arizona.

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Jay Stanley, a policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union, said he is skeptical of the technology's ability to make schools safer.

"Facial recognition has gotten much more accurate in controlled conditions — for example, if you're taking a passport photo" with good lighting and without items like a mask, a hat or sunglasses, he said. "But when you're talking about people out in the world who are running around, cameras are seeing them from all different angles. ... The efficacy rates can be much lower."

Stanley contributed to a 2023 ACLU report on the school surveillance industry, which he said concluded the industry "engages in deceptive marketing practices" and often relies on "drumming up fear."

He also raised concerns about facial recognition's impact on students' experiences at school.

"If you feel that a camera is not just a dumb eye, but it's actually got a brain behind it that is now looking at you and trying to decide whether it should alert somebody about you, that can really contribute to an oppressive surveillance environment," Stanley said.

Facial recognition technology was banned in New York schools last year after a report from the state's Office of Information Technology Services determined that the risks, including to civil rights and student privacy, may outweigh the potential benefits. The report noted that evidence suggests facial recognition technology produces higher rates of false positives for people of color, nonbinary and transgender people, women and children.

Leila Nashashibi, a campaigner for Fight for the Future, which has been pushing to ban facial recognition technology, said she worries about the risks to privacy that come with collecting biometric data, which could be susceptible to potential hacks.

In 2021, the manufacturer of the cameras purchased by Higley and Baboquivari, Verkada, was subjected to a hack of thousands of its cameras' security footage. In a statement to The Arizona Republic, a spokesperson said the company "took immediate action to address the targeted attack" and has since "significantly strengthened its data security practices," including by obtaining several cybersecurity and privacy certifications.

From Nashashibi's perspective, facial recognition creates a "chilling effect."

"School is such a sensitive and formative period for young people, where they're experimenting with identity and political views ... and taking risks in different ways," she said. She thinks the technology can be problematic for students with disabilities, too — "students whose bodies move in different ways than a facial recognition algorithm programmatically think bodies should move."

Stefanie Coyle, the deputy director of the Education Policy Center at the New York Civil Liberties Union, which in 2020 sued a New York school district over its use of facial recognition technology, said she believes the technology could impact student interactions and, in particular, worries about whether schools might use it for gang enforcement.

"If a kid thinks the school is going to be spying on who they're walking in the hallway with or who they're talking to, that has a chilling effect," Coyle said.

Tolleson Union High School District spent $782,000 to equip its surveillance system with AI capabilities, as well as to add some additional cameras and devices. The district plans to use the new system to monitor crowd behaviors and traffic patterns, Superintendent Jeremy Calles said.

The system will flag anomalies, like when a group of students stops or gathers, which he said isan indication that a fight could be breaking out.

If a student is in the bathroom for an unusual amount of time, the system flags that, too, as a sign that something is potentially wrong, Calles said. The cameras won’t store student information linking names to faces, he said.

He added that the system will detect weapons that are exposed on campus and observe movements around the school perimeter. The security system is new this year.

“I cannot hire enough security guards to be able to position everybody all around the perimeter of our school and say, ‘Your job is to stare at a fence for six or seven hours.’ But the cameras can do that,” Calles said.

Even so, Calles said he anticipates false positives will slip through, which is why his district hired extra security staffers, one on every campus, who can rotate monitoring the AI video feed.

Because even in the age of AI, educators say, a human set of eyes should still look over a machine’s work.

Reach the reporters at mparrish@arizonarepublic.com and nicholas.sullivan@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: AI, facial recognition camera systems coming to Arizona schools