In January 2020, Detroit police wrongfully arrested our client Robert Williams outside his home, in front of his two young daughters and wife and in plain view of his neighbors, and subjected him to thirty hours of detention in an overcrowded, dirty cell. [...] The face recognition search returned a possible match to an expired driver's license photo of Mr. Williams. But the match was dead wrong: Mr. Williams was plainly not the man in the security footage and was nowhere near the store at the time of the alleged theft.
Curated from aclu.org · 28 June 2024 →
A shoplifting at a Detroit watch shop in 2018 left a blurry still from a security camera. Police ran it through face recognition, which returned Robert Williams's expired licence photograph, and then built a photo lineup around that result and showed it to a contractor who had not been in the shop and whose only knowledge of the theft was the same poor footage. This is the first publicly reported wrongful arrest from a face recognition match anywhere. The lawsuit settled on 28 June 2024 with what the ACLU calls the strongest police policy in the United States on the technology: no arrest on a face match without independent evidence, no lineup built from a match alone, mandatory training, and an audit of every case since 2017. The compounding failure is worth naming, because it is a process failure and not a model failure: the match was treated as an identification, and every later step was built on it.
