It's beyond irresponsibility - it's actively malevolent. There unfortunately are police officers, as demonstrated by recent high profile killings by police, who will use the thinnest of pretexts, like suspicion of paying with counterfeit bills, to justify the use of brutal and lethal force.
If such people are empowered by a facial recognition match, what's to stop them from similarly using that as a pretext for applying disproportionate brutality?
Even worse, a false positive match triggered arrest may be more likely to escalate to violence because the person being apprehended would be rightfully upset that they were being targeted, and appear to be resisting arrest.
If your strategy is to get rid of all pretexts for police action, I don't think that is the right one. Instead we need to set a high standard of conduct and make sure it is upheld. If you don't understand a tool, don't use it. If you do something horrible while using a tool you don't understand, it is negligent/irresponsible/maybe even malevolent, because it was your responsibility to understand it before using it.
A weatherman saying there is a 90% chance of rain is not evidence that it rained. And I understand the fear that a prediction can be abused, and we need to make sure it isn't abused. But abolishing the weatherman isn't the way to do it.
Not at all.
> Instead we need to set a high standard of conduct and make sure it is upheld
Yes, but we should be real about what this means. The institution of law enforcement is rotten, which is why it protects bad actors to such a degree. It needs to be cleaved from its racist history and be rebuilt nearly from the ground up. Better training in interpreting results from an ML model won't be enough by a long shot.