Virginia Beach police admit officers tried a controversial facial recognition program the force had denied using Jonathan Edwards, The Virginian-Pilot After repeated denials, Virginia Beach police admitted last week some of their detectives used a controversial facial recognition program during criminal investigations. In February 2020 and again in September, the Police Department told The Virginian-Pilot it had never used Clearview AI. It also denied using any other facial recognition technology recently, though the department briefly experimented with an in-house system at the Oceanfront in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But records obtained by The Pilot through the state’s open records law revealed 10 detectives signed up for Clearview accounts, from November 2019 to at least late February 2020. Only after those detectives asked the department to pay to use Clearview on a more permanent basis did police officials realize they’d been wrong when they repeatedly told the newspaper the department had never used Clearview, police spokeswoman Officer Linda Kuehn said Tuesday. She said that’s what she’d been told, which is why she issued the denials to The Pilot in February 2020 and in September.