In 2021, it might be simpler to ask what can't be mapped. Just as Google and social media have enabled each of us to reach into the figurative diaries and desk drawers of anyone we might be curious about, law enforcement agencies today have access to powerful new engines of data processing and association. Ogden is hardly the tip of the spear: police agencies in major cities are already using facial recognition to identify suspects--sometimes falsely--and deploying predictive policing to define patrol routes. "That's not happening here," Ogden's current police chief, Eric Young, told me. "We don't have any kind of machine intelligence."

But if the woman hadn't had a minor traffic violation previously, she might have languished in the hospital, according to Sgt. Coello and the commanding officer of the New York Police Department's Real Time Crime Center want access to the Department of Motor Vehicles database of driver's licenses. Supervisors of the Facial Identification Section, launched as a pilot in 2011, see utilizing facial recognition to identify missing people as the next frontier of a technology that until now has been used mostly to identify potential suspects or witnesses for detectives investigating crimes. Critics say obtaining a DMV database--with thousands of photographs of innocent New Yorkers--raises serious privacy concerns. "The only way we can identify them right now is if they've been arrested," said Inspector Joseph Courtesis, commanding officer of the Real Time Crime Center, which oversees the facial identification section.