Dallas police quietly plugged Clearview AI into their investigative toolbox last fall, and in the first 11 months detectives ran more than 140 searches with the facial‑recognition software. Most of those checks were tied to robbery, sexual assault and other felony investigations. Now department leaders are weighing a policy change that would let detectives fire up the same tool in Class B misdemeanor cases, a shift privacy advocates say would turn facial recognition into a routine part of everyday policing. Civil‑liberties lawyers warn that widening its use could raise the risk of misidentification and wrongful arrests.
What the records show
Records and court filings reviewed by The Dallas Morning News show the department logged more than 140 Clearview search requests between October 2024 and September 2025, with just under 40% returning a “possible candidate match” in that time frame. Police used the tool most frequently in robbery and aggravated‑robbery investigations, and an internal spreadsheet shows several requests were rejected because supervisors did not sign off or the images were too poor in quality.
In one case, investigators linked a suspect to a Lake Highlands apartment robbery after a Clearview “possible match” pointed analysts toward additional investigative steps. The suspect ultimately pleaded guilty and received a five‑year prison sentence.
Police officials say it speeds investigations
In a July Q&A with TechHalo, Maj. Brian Lamberson, who oversees the department’s Fusion Center, said Clearview had “dramatically” sped up investigations and that its leads have led to multiple arrests for violent offenses — five that are confirmed. Police officials emphasize that the software is supposed to generate investigative leads, not courtroom proof, and that searches require a supervisor’s approval before any results get passed to detectives.
City officials want to widen the rules
Assistant Chief Mark Villarreal told the City Council public safety committee last month that the department wants to allow Clearview searches in “Class B misdemeanors and above,” particularly for property crimes such as package theft, according to The Dallas Morning News. City paperwork shows the platform cost roughly $88,455, paid for with grant funding. The department says the software cannot be used to scan livestreams or monitor First Amendment activity, and officials stress that a possible match by itself would not qualify as probable cause for an arrest.
What a Class B misdemeanor looks like in Texas
Under Texas law, a Class B misdemeanor can carry up to 180 days in county jail and a fine of as much as $2,000. Many thefts valued between $100 and $750 fall into this category, meaning an expansion of Clearview to Class B cases would extend facial‑recognition searches into a wide range of lower‑value property investigations. The punishment ranges and theft thresholds are laid out in the state penal code and related chapters on punishment and theft.
Civil‑liberties groups push back
Privacy and defense advocates say expanding biometric searches to more routine cases will increase the odds of wrongful arrests and unequal outcomes, pointing to documented incidents in which face‑recognition matches turned out to be faulty or misleading. Nathan Freed Wessler of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project has warned in public statements that face recognition “often gets it wrong” and should be treated as only one piece of an investigation, not proof on its own.
The company behind Clearview has also drawn scrutiny for how it built its database, after reporting that the firm scraped billions of publicly posted photos from social media and other platforms to populate its search engine…