Nine people died at Cook County Jail last year. One of those deaths — that of Martinez Duncan — was ruled a homicide. And now, instead of addressing what went wrong, the Cook County Sheriff's Office is asking taxpayers to approve a $1.12 million contract for AI-powered surveillance technology called BriefCam.

The Cook County Board of Commissioners must reject this contract — or at the very least, delay any vote until an independent review of the jail is complete.

BriefCam comes with facial recognition built in. The sheriff's office says it won't connect the system to a biometric database, but the technology works by analyzing people's physical attributes — their height, weight, gait, and clothing — to track individuals across thousands of hours of footage. According to Stephen Ragan, a policy and advocacy strategist with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Illinois, those methods raise the same civil rights concerns as facial recognition, and Illinois law doesn't give people in government custody the same privacy protections it gives everyone else. That means the sheriff's office would essentially be regulating itself — with no independent oversight and no public accountability.

There is also a documented risk of dangerous errors. In Baltimore, an AI system mistook a teenager's bag of chips for a gun — and police responded accordingly. Research shows these tools misidentify Black people at higher rates than other groups. More than half of the people held at Cook County Jail are Black. Introducing technology that is prone to this kind of bias into an already high-tension environment — where misidentification could trigger a confrontation — is not a safety upgrade. It's a risk.

The Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice and more than 80 community, faith, and policy organizations have already called conditions at Cook County Jail a "human rights crisis." Spending over a million dollars on speculative surveillance technology before answering for the deaths that happened there is reckless and wrong.

We're calling on the Cook County Board of Commissioners to vote no on the BriefCam contract and to prioritize a full, independent review of safety conditions at the jail before any AI surveillance spending is approved.