Bahia facial recognition pilot allegedly targets Black and poor populations
The Government of Bahia deployed a facial recognition pilot for public security that allegedly exhibited severe racial bias. The system disproportionately targeted Black and poor individuals, leading to concerns over wrongful identifications.
The system's failure demonstrated a stark disparity in accuracy, disproportionately misidentifying Black and poor citizens.
Key facts
- What
- The Government of Bahia deployed a facial recognition pilot for public security that allegedly exhibited severe racial bias.
- Incident date
- Dec 1, 2018
- Who
- Government of Bahia
- Failure mode
- Policy Violation
- AI surface
- Computer Vision
- Severity
- High
What happened
The Government of Bahia implemented a facial recognition pilot for public security and policing. Reports from human rights organizations and researchers indicate that the system disproportionately targeted Black and poor populations. These failures led to widespread concerns regarding wrongful identifications and systemic discrimination.
What broke inside the model
- 01 · TriggerA prompt pushes against a deployment boundary.
- 02 · Model stepThe model produces the disallowed output.
- 03 · Control gapNo enforcement blocks it at generation time.
- 04 · FailureThe output crosses the policy line.
- 05 · ConsequenceA limit the business set is breached in public.
The output crosses a policy boundary the deployment had defined.
The facial recognition system exhibited algorithmic racial bias, with significantly higher error rates for Black individuals than for white individuals. This failure in the model's accuracy for diverse skin tones led to a high frequency of false positives during identification.
What it cost
Sources
- SocialReconhecimento Facial na Bahia: mais erros policiais contra negros e pobrestarciziosilva.com.br
- SocialLack of regulation and inequality exacerbate flaws in facial recognition in Brazilconectas.org
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/bahia-facial-recognition-pilot-allegedly-targetsAI Failure Index. "Bahia facial recognition pilot allegedly targets Black and poor populations" (FI-0465). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/bahia-facial-recognition-pilot-allegedly-targets (indexed Jun 10, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0465. Full dataset at /data.
Note from Realm Labs, the Index steward
How Realm fits
- Prism
- OmniGuard
This entry sits in the index's predictive wing: a system that scores, ranks, perceives, or steers rather than generates. Realm's runtime layer is built for the generative and agentic systems now moving into these same decision seats, where it watches a model's internal state and holds an unsupported claim or an unchecked action before it commits. The control gap on this record, an automated decision that reached people with no runtime check in front of it, is the same gap. The index keeps predictive failures on the record because the pattern carries straight into the systems shipping today.