In January 2020, Robert Williams spent 30 hours in a Detroit jail because facial recognition technology showed him to be a criminal. The match was wrong and Mr. Williams sued.
On Friday, as part of a legal settlement over his wrongful arrest, Mr. Williams received a commitment from the Detroit Police Department to do better. The city adopted new rules for police use of facial recognition technology that the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented Mr. Williams, says should be the new national standard.
“Hopefully it will move the needle in the right direction,” Mr Williams said.
Mr Williams was the first person known to have been wrongfully arrested on the basis of mistaken identity. But he wasn’t the last. Detroit police have arrested at least two more people as a result of facial recognition investigations gone wrong, including a woman accused of carjacking when she was eight months pregnant.
Law enforcement agencies across the country are using facial recognition technology to try to track down criminals whose misdeeds are caught on camera. In Michigan, the software compares an unknown person to those in a database of mug shots or driver’s license photos. In other jurisdictions, police use tools such as Clearview AI that look for photos that have been removed from social networking sites and the public internet.
One of the major new rules adopted in Detroit is that images of people identified through facial recognition technology can no longer be shown to eyewitnesses in a photo lineup unless there is other evidence linking them to the crime.
“The pipeline of ‘take a picture, slap it in a composition’ is going to end,” said Phil Mayor, an attorney for the ACLU of Michigan. “This settlement transforms the Detroit Police Department from the most documented misuse of facial recognition technology to a national leader in the use of protective barriers.”
Police say facial recognition technology is a powerful tool to help solve crimes, but some cities and states, including San Francisco. Austin, Texas? and Portland, Ore., have temporarily banned its use due to privacy and racial bias concerns. Stephen Lamoreaux, chief of information technology at Detroit’s crime intelligence unit, said the police department was “very willing to use technology in a meaningful way for public safety.” Detroit, he argued, has “the strongest politics in the nation right now.”
How can it go wrong
Mr. Williams was arrested following a crime that occurred in 2018. A man stole five watches from a downtown Detroit boutique while being caught on surveillance camera. A loss prevention company provided the video to the Detroit Police Department.
A search of the man’s face using driver’s license photos and mug shots produced 243 photos, which were classified based on the system’s confidence that they were the same person in the surveillance video, according to documents disclosed as part of Mr. Williams’ lawsuit. An old driver’s license photo for Mr. Williams was ninth on the list. The person conducting the investigation deemed him a better fit and sent a report to a Detroit police detective.
The detective included Mr Williams’ image in a “six-pack photo series” – photographs of six people in a grid – which he showed to the security contractor who had provided the store’s surveillance video. She agreed that Mr. Williams was a better match for the boutique man, and that led to the warrant for his arrest. Mr Williams, who was in his office at a car supply company when the watches were stolen, spent the night in jail and had his fingerprints and DNA taken. He was charged with retail fraud and had to hire a lawyer to defend himself. Prosecutors eventually dropped the case.
He sued Detroit in 2021, hoping to enforce a ban on the technology so others don’t suffer his fate. He said he was upset last year when he learned that Detroit police had charged Porcha Woodruff with carjacking and robbery after a bad facial recognition match. Police arrested Ms. Woodruff as she was getting her children ready for school. He has also sued the city. the lawsuit is ongoing.
“It’s so dangerous,” Mr. Williams said, referring to facial recognition technology. “I don’t see the positive benefit in that.”
The new rules
Detroit police are responsible for three of the seven known cases where facial recognition led to an illegal arrest. (The others were in Louisiana, New Jersey, Maryland and Texas.) But Detroit officials said the new controls will prevent more abuses. And they remain optimistic about the technology’s potential to solve crimes, which they now only use in serious crimes, including assaults, murders and home invasions.
Detroit Police Chief James White blamed “human error” for the illegal arrests. His officers, he said, relied too much on the leads the technology generated. It was their judgment that was faulty, not the machine’s.
The new policy, which comes into effect this month, is supposed to help with that. Under the new rules, police can no longer show a person’s face to an eyewitness based on just a facial recognition match.
“There has to be some kind of secondary corroborating piece of unrelated evidence before there’s enough justification for it to go into the lineup,” he said. Mr. Lamoreaux of the Detroit Crime Squad. The police would need location information from a person’s phone, say, or DNA evidence – more than a physical resemblance.
The department is also changing the way photographs are conducted. It’s adopting what’s called double-blind sequencing, which is considered a fairer way to identify someone. Instead of presenting a six-pack to a witness, an officer—one who doesn’t know who the prime suspect is—presents the photos one at a time. And the composition includes a different photo of the person than the one the facial recognition system showed.
Police should also disclose that a face search was conducted, as well as the quality of the image of the face searched — How grainy was the surveillance camera? How visible is the suspect’s face? — because a poor quality image is less likely to produce reliable results. They will also have to disclose the age of the photo that was turned up by the automated system and whether there were other photos of the person in the database that didn’t show up as matches.
Franklin Hayes, Detroit’s deputy police chief, said he is confident the new practices will prevent future mistaken identities.
“There are still some things that might get away, for example, identical twins,” Mr Hayes said. “We can never say never, but we think this is our best policy yet.”
Arun Ross, a Michigan State University computer science professor who specializes in facial recognition technology, said Detroit’s policy was a great starting point and that other agencies should adopt it.
“We don’t want to encroach on people’s rights and privacy, but we also don’t want crime to run rampant,” Mr Ross said.
How Much Does It Help?
Eyewitness identification is a difficult endeavor, and police have embraced body cameras and facial recognition as more reliable tools than imperfect human memory.
Chief White told local lawmakers last year that facial recognition technology helped “take 16 killers off the street.” When asked for more information, Police Department officials did not provide details on those cases.
Instead, to show the department’s successes with technology, officers played surveillance video of a man pouring fuel into a gas station and setting it on fire. They said he had been identified with facial recognition technology and arrested that night. He later pleaded guilty.
The Detroit Police Department is one of the few that monitors facial recognition searches, submitting weekly reports on its use to an oversight board. In previous years, it averaged more than 100 searches a year, with about half of those searches turning up potential matches.
The division only tracks how often a lead is taken, not whether the lead goes out. But as part of her settlement with Mr. Williams — who also received $300,000, according to a police spokesman — she must conduct an audit of facial recognition searches dating back to when she first started using the technology in 2017. If identifies other cases in which people were arrested with little or no evidence other than a personal match, the department is supposed to notify the appropriate prosecutor.
Molly Kleinman, director of a technology research center at the University of Michigan, said the new protections sounded promising, but she remained skeptical.
“Detroit is a highly policed city. There are cameras everywhere,” he said. “If all this surveillance technology really did what it claims, Detroit would be one of the safest cities in the country.”
Willie Burton, a member of the Board of Police Commissioners, an oversight group that approved the new policies, described them as “a step in the right direction,” although he remained opposed to police use of facial recognition technology.
“The technology is not ready yet,” Mr Burton said. “One false arrest is one too many, and having three in Detroit should raise alarm bells to stop it.”
