It’s been well-known, and has been for years, that police use of facial recognition technology disproportionately affects Black people more than other demographic groups, but in the wake of the wrongful arrest of a Black man nearly six years ago, one city is planning to change how it uses the technology.
Kiki Layne talks about her roles in ‘Dandelion’ and ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’
Kiki Layne talks about her roles in ‘Dandelion’ and ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’
The city of Detroit agreed to pay Robert Williams $300,000 in a settlement agreement last month and agreed to review how police use facial recognition technology to solve criminal cases, according to the Associated Press.
Detroit police plan to retroactively review all incidents in which facial recognition technology was used between 2017 and 2023 and notify prosecutors if arrests were made without evidence that doesn’t rely on the technology.
Robert Williams’ wrongful arrest
Williams was arrested in 2018 after a watch was stolen from a Detroit-area store. The only evidence Detroit police had was the store’s security camera footage. Officers sent the footage to Michigan State Police, who ran a search using facial recognition technology that turned up a photo of Williams’ expired driver’s license, according to the lawsuit.
Williams claimed he was not the man in the photograph, but Detroit police used his photo to create a mugshot lineup and showed it to a man who was not a witness to the crime but had only seen the store’s security camera footage.
Nevertheless, an officer, whose identity has not been disclosed, applied for an arrest warrant.
In April 2021, Williams, with the support of the ACLU and the University of Michigan Law School’s Civil Rights Litigation Initiative, filed a civil rights lawsuit against the detective, the city, and the city’s police chief.
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The lawsuit alleges that detectives misled magistrate judges by filling out warrant applications incompletely, resulting in warrants being issued without the necessary probable cause. It also alleges that, consistent with Williams’ case and several other recent cases of false facial recognition arrests in Detroit, the city did not have a policy regarding the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement at the time it was used in this case, and that the city failed to train its officers about the dangers of misusing the technology in investigations.
Past examples of facial recognition affecting black people
Even before Williams was wrongfully arrested, facial recognition technology was already harming Black people.
In 2018, 28 members of Congress, including six members of the Congressional Black Caucus, were falsely identified as criminal suspects by Amazon’s facial recognition technology.
In December 2020, a Black man in New Jersey filed a lawsuit after he was mistakenly identified as a suspect in a shoplifting incident at a hotel gift shop. He was jailed for 10 days.
In July 2021, a black girl was banned from an ice skating rink in Michigan after facial recognition software misidentified her as another black girl who had been involved in a fight at the rink the previous day.
In August 2023, a pregnant black woman in Detroit was mistakenly identified as the perpetrator of a carjacking and arrested thanks to this technology.
