Black man is first wrongful arrest in US caused by facial recognition tech, ACLU says
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint to Detroit police on Wednesday, alleging the wrongful arrest of a Black man resulted from an incorrect facial recognition match.
Robert Williams was arrested in January by the Detroit Police Department based on a facial recognition identification that incorrectly matched him with a person who stole five watches from a Shinola store, according to the ACLU complaint.
Williams’ case is the first wrongful arrest based on an incorrect facial recognition match in the United States, according to the ACLU.
“At every step, DPD’s conduct has been improper: it unthinkingly relied on flawed and racist facial recognition technology without taking reasonable measures to verify the information being provided, it conducted a shoddy and incomplete investigation, its officers were rude and threatening, and it has completely failed to respond to a FOIA request seeking relevant records,” the complaint reads.
Williams detailed his experience in a Washington Post op-ed, writing that he thought it was a “prank” when a police officer called and said he needed to turn himself in. Williams said he was arrested in front of his wife and children and taken to the Detroit Detention Center, where he was held without being told what crime he allegedly committed.
“The next morning, two officers asked if I’d ever been to a Shinola watch store in Detroit,” Williams wrote. “I said once, many years ago. They showed me a blurry surveillance camera photo of a black man and asked if it was me. I chuckled a bit. ‘No, that is not me.’ He showed me another photo and said, ‘So I guess this isn’t you either?’ I picked up the piece of paper, put it next to my face and said, ‘I hope you guys don’t think that all black men look alike.’”
The false match to Williams resulted from “Michigan state police’s digital image analysis section, which has been using a face matching service from Rank One Computing,” Reuters reported.
Guidelines from Rank One and Michigan police say a facial recognition match shouldn’t be the basis for arresting someone, according to Reuters.
McClatchy News reached out to police and Rank One for comment Wednesday but did not immediately get a response.
The ACLU demanded in the complaint that the Detroit Police Department stop using facial recognition because “the technology is flawed” and “DPD investigators are not competent in making use of such technology.”
A study from the National Institute of Standards and Technology found that there were more false positive matches for Asian and Black faces compared to white faces. The American Indian group had the highest rate of false positives.
The study was done through NIST’s Face Recognition Vendor Test program and evaluated 189 software algorithms from 99 developers.
Amazon announced that the police wouldn’t be able to use its facial recognition technology for a year, NPR reported.
Microsoft also said it wouldn’t sell its facial recognition to police departments unless required by law, The Washington Post reported.
“Even if this technology does become accurate (at the expense of people like me), I don’t want my daughters’ faces to be part of some government database,” Williams wrote for the Post. “I don’t want cops showing up at their door because they were recorded at a protest the government didn’t like.”
This story was originally published June 24, 2020 at 12:12 PM with the headline "Black man is first wrongful arrest in US caused by facial recognition tech, ACLU says."