In 2015, Guyana was recategorized as a middle-income country. With new industries, came enhanced needs for technological evolution in a country that has lagged behind the region in ICT development. In order to maintain its trajectory as one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, Guyana began moves to revolutionise the country’s technology in order to encourage innovative solutions to addressing pressing social, cultural, environmental and economic issues. One of the areas earmarked for technological evolution was social order.
In 2022, the Government of Guyana indicated that the Guyana Police Force (GPF) would soon be utilizing smart technology such as facial recognition to fight crime. The planned use of this technology is aimed at enhancing forensic investigative capacity. While it can serve this purpose, facial recognition technology is a form of surveillance that will provide additional power to the GPF to monitor, track, and easily identify citizens. We should be cautious about it as it can increase police power over citizens, further impacting the democratic rights of historically marginalized populations in Guyana.
The GPF as an institution was birthed out of the colonial desire to capture runaway slaves during enslavement. It then moved towards the imprisonment of former slaves and indentured persons following the Emanci-pation Act, before transitioning to the modern policing system known today. During the early stages of colonialist expansion, the use of technology such as maps and astrolabes allowed European exploration vessels to successfully navigate the open seas, into new territories. This led to atrocities such as genocide, enslavement and indentureship across the Global South, the ramifications of which are still being felt today. Similarly, modern tracking/surveillance technology reinforces these unequal power systems, providing the police force with the means to surveil and target historically oppressed groups in countries such as Guyana.
The usage of surveillance technology such as facial recognition demonstrates the conundrum inherent within the dual-use that innovative technology can encapsulate. While there are positives to these technologies such as aiding in helping to find missing persons and solving
crimes, what they also do is place more power into the hands of State mechanisms that have historically been harmful towards marginalized communities. This contributes towards an exacerbation of inequalities that can be difficult to address given underdeveloped accountability mechanisms for innovative technologies in Guyana. The GPF’s history of serving as the heavy arm of the neo-colonial state through suppression of dissent and extrajudicial killings will be further enhanced by this technology. Increased surveillance technology, however, does not always result in violence, but its impact is still felt among vulnerable communities. With heightened physical surveillance and tracking of historically Black communities in Guyana, the GPF has created an environment of fear and instability among residents, also contributing towards the public ghettoization of these communities. With the plan for facial recognition technology to be implemented at major ports, stoplights and other key areas around the country, there are many implications for one’s right to privacy and security, as the threat of being constantly surveilled can shape behaviour. By enabling the GPF to surveil people with ease and bring about supposed order, it constrains other citizens from certain actions such as protests.
Philosopher of Technology, Andrew Feenberg argued that technology is a greater power than the political system itself in many domains. This acknowledges that technology itself can be very political, demonstrating the importance of developing technologies that focus not only on its technical capacity but rather on a socio-technical perspective. This would ensure that the potential impacts of the technology on sections of society are taken into account and appropriately addressed, as when tech fails or is used for the wrong purposes, it can cause significant harm.
The unreliability of facial recognition technology in identifying Black, Indigenous and other people of colour is also of concern. In addition to issues with the accurate identification of these groups, there are also issues with the technology’s confidence threshold, which makes it more susceptible to providing wrong information. The confidence threshold is related to the level of certainty in identifying persons through the software. Given Guyana’s high Black population that has been imprisoned due to major factors such as police and judicial bias, matched with Guyana’s low technological capacity, there is vast potential for misidentification, which can lead to a feedback loop of Black groups, in particular, being targetted by the GPF, solidifying anti-Black stereotypes around criminality.
The increasing interest and reliance on surveillance technologies such as facial recognition by democratic states such as Guyana can see them being provided with unprecedented power. While this is often rationalized as being aimed towards increasing equality and inhibiting crime, the controlling functions of facial recognition can contribute towards autocratic State elements that threaten democracy. Given Guyana’s history of suppression of dissent and physical monitoring of disadvantaged communities, these technologies in their hands have the potential to be disastrous, further impacting police-community relations and civil liberties.
Innovation is an integral part of a developing society, but innovation can also make the playing field between those with power and those without even more uneven, significantly impacting their autonomy and experience of democracy. Innovation is inherently political and requires oversight that is accountable not only to other power actors but to citizens who are impacted by it. Should facial recognition technology be deployed across the country as a crime-fighting mechanism by the Guyana Police Force, more public oversight will be needed for ensuring adherence to citizens’ democratic rights and curbing the force’s power.
