In 2017, the sheriff’s office in Washington County, Oregon, became the first law enforcement agency to use Rekognition, Amazon’s facial recognition tool. Then, for two day in March 2019, the office granted journalists for The Washington Post access to its squad cars and facilities to observe how the technology was transforming cops’ operations.

What those journalists discovered was that officers were using Rekognition in ways far beyond what Amazon intended, including to identify unconscious suspects, people who refused to identify themselves, dead bodies, and even police sketches of faces — a startling example of how the tech is already being misused by law enforcement in the wild.

Long story short, the number of potential problems with the way the Washington County Sheriff’s Office is using Rekognition are staggering.

AI experts told WaPo that the use of sketches in lieu of photographs could lead to more false matches. Officers might then try to force their investigations to align with those false matches, according to Marc Brown, chief deputy defender with Oregon’s Office of Public Defense Service.

“You’ve already been told that this is the one, so when you investigate, that’s going to be in your mind,” he told WaPo. “The question is no longer who committed the crime, but where’s the evidence to support the computer’s analysis?”