Yost Pulls Access To State Facial Recognition System For Local Officers

Attorney General Dave Yost is shutting off direct access to the state's facial recognition database of driver’s license photos for thousands of local law enforcement officers, after a review of who was using the database and how it was being used.

Yost said the database was not used for mass surveillance or dragnets by federal officials. Yost on July 9 ordered a review of access to the state databases and how that data is being used after a  Washington Post story listed Ohio as one of 21 states that have shared its drivers' license database with the FBI for facial recognition scans, in part to search for undocumented immigrants.

But he is still cutting off access for 4,549 local officers until law enforcement is properly trained about the system’s flaws, requiring they instead work through state investigators at the Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI).

"Everything is being done well. I want it to be done better," he said. "I want to make sure all of our law enforcement and partners that are using this tool are using it properly."

The attorney general's office is also putting together an advisory board to create guidelines for how the database can be used while still protecting Ohioans' privacy rights and civil liberties.

Yost's office said the database contains a total of 24 million images, with 21 million of them coming from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles — and all of the images date no farther back than 2011.

In the last two years, Ohio’s database was searched more than 11,000 times, nearly always by local law enforcement agencies. Only 3.8 percent of the searches since 2017 were by federal agencies and only 116 total searches were by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

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