The city of Detroit has agreed to pay $300,000 to Robert Williams, a Black man wrongly arrested for shoplifting due to flawed facial recognition technology.
As part of the settlement, the city will also make changes to how police use facial recognition software when making arrests.
A Case of Mistaken Identity
Robert Williams’ wrongful arrest stems from a misidentification by facial recognition software. According to The Guardian, the software incorrectly matched Williams’ driver’s license photo to a suspect seen in a 2018 security video from a Shinola watch store.
Despite the software’s erroneous identification, Williams was arrested, highlighting flaws in the technology, especially its racial biases.
“The Detroit Police Department’s abuses of facial recognition technology completely upended my life,” said Williams in a release from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
“My wife and young daughters had to watch helplessly as I was arrested for a crime I didn’t commit, and by the time I got home from jail, I had already missed my youngest losing her first tooth, and my eldest couldn’t even bear to look at my picture. Even now, years later, it still brings them to tears when they think about it.
“The scariest part is that what happened to me could have happened to anyone,” he continued. “But, at least with this settlement, it will be far less likely to happen again to another person in Detroit.”
Changes to how police use facial recognition tech
The settlement, announced by the ACLU and the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative at the University of Michigan Law School, includes new policies to prevent wrongful arrests.
Detroit police will no longer arrest individuals solely based on facial recognition results or photo lineups from such searches.
Instead, facial recognition will serve merely as a lead, requiring corroboration through traditional investigative methods.
“They can get a facial-recognition lead and then they can go out and do old-fashioned police work and see if there’s actually any reason to believe that the person who was identified might have committed a crime,” said Phil Mayor, an attorney with the ACLU.
A review of past facial recognition tech cases
The agreement also mandates a review of cases from 2017 to 2023 where facial recognition technology was used. If it is found that arrests were made without independent evidence, prosecutors will be notified.
This retrospective action aims to ensure justice for others who may have been wrongly implicated due to flawed technology.
This settlement and policy overhaul came after a similar incident where a pregnant woman was wrongly charged with carjacking.
In response, Chief James White implemented policies requiring additional evidence to support facial recognition identifications.
Image Credit: ACLU
