- In January a Black man in
Detroit was wrongfully arrested after being misidentified byfacial recognition technology, The New York Times reports. - Robert Julian-Borchak Williams was detained for 30 hours, and when he pointed out to
police that he didn't look like CCTV footage of the suspect one detective said "I guess the computer got it wrong." - Experts and activists have objected to the use of facial recognition by law enforcement for years, as the technology has been shown to display
racial bias .
In what might be the first known case of its kind in the US, a man was wrongfully arrested after being misidentified by facial recognition software.
The New York Times first reported the news.
Robert Julian-Borchak Williams was arrested in front of his wife and children in Detroit in January of this year, and accused of shoplifting five watches costing $3,800 from a Shinola store in October 2018. He was taken and held overnight a cell in the Detroit Detention Center.
Williams told the Times was taken to an interrogation room where he was shown CCTV images of the shoplifter. The images were clearly not of Williams, and after he held the picture next to his own face one of the detectives said: "I guess the computer got it wrong."
Williams was not immediately allowed to leave and wasn't released until later that evening on a $1,000 bond, meaning he spent a total of 30 hours in custody.
Unbeknownst to Williams at the time, he had been misidentified by a piece of facial recognition technology called DataWorks Plus, which is used by Michigan State Police.
After the image of the suspect was run through the technology it threw up a picture of Williams' driver's licence. This was then sent off to Detroit police in an "Investigative Lead Report," which emphasized the match didn't constitute positive identification. "It is an investigative lead only and is not probable cause for arrest," the report read.
Williams' picture was then shown to a security guard, who also wrongfully identified him.
As the George Floyd protests have thrust police brutality towards Black people back into the spotlight, the use of facial recognition by law enforcement has come under fire.
Activists and AI experts have for years advocated banning the use of the technology by law enforcement, as the technology has been shown to display racial bias. One reason for this is that the datasets used to train facial recognition algorithms are often made up predominantly of white male faces. This means the algorithms become more accurate at identifying white men, but are more inaccurate when it comes to women and people of color.
Williams' case appears to be evidence of what experts and activists have warned against for years, that the use of the technology would lead to false arrests and over-policing of Black people. In mid-June IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft promised to either halt or suspend the sale of their facial recognition tech to law enforcement, and on Wednesday Boston joined cities like San Francisco in banning the use of it by city agencies.
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Following the publication of the Times' report, the Wayne County prosecutor's office said in a statement Williams will be able to have the case expunged from his record and have his fingerprint data removed.
"This case should not have been issued based on the DPD [Detroit Police Department] investigation, and for that we apologize. Thankfully, it was dismissed on our office's own motion. This does not in any way make up for the hours that Mr. Williams spent in jail."