A Black man who was wrongfully arrested when facial recognition technology mistakenly identified him as a suspected shoplifter wants Detroit police to apologize — and…
A Black man who was wrongfully arrested when facial recognition technology mistakenly identified him as a suspected shoplifter wants Detroit police to apologize — and to end their use of the controversial technology.
The complaint by Robert Williams is a rare challenge from someone who not only experienced an erroneous face recognition hit, but was able to discover that it was responsible for his subsequent legal troubles.
The Wednesday complaint filed on Williams’ behalf alleges that his Michigan driver license photo — kept in a statewide image repository — was incorrectly flagged as a likely match to a shoplifting suspect. Investigators had scanned grainy surveillance camera footage of an alleged 2018 theft inside a Shinola watch store in midtown Detroit, police records show.
That led to what Williams describes as a humiliating January arrest in front of his wife and young daughters on their front lawn in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills.
“I can’t really even put it into words,” Williams said in a video announcement describing the daytime arrest that left his daughters weeping. “It was one of the most shocking things that I ever had happen to me.”
The 42-year-old automotive worker, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, is demanding a public apology, final dismissal of his case and for Detroit police to scrap its use of facial recognition technology. Several studies have shown current face-recognition systems more likely to err when identifying people with darker skin.
The ACLU complaint said Detroit police “unthinkingly relied on flawed and racist facial recognition technology without taking reasonable measures to verify the information being provided.” It called the resulting investigation “shoddy and incomplete,” the officers involved “rude and threatening,” and said the department has dragged its feet responding to public-information requests for relevant records.
In a written statement Wednesday, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy apologized for her office taking up the case, while noting she has long expressed reservations to Detroit police about face-recognition technology because of its unreliability, “especially as it relates to people of color.”
“This case should not have been issued based on the DPD investigation, and for that we apologize,” she said. “Thankfully, it was dismissed on our office’s own motion.
