In January 2020, Robert Williams spent 30 hours in a Detroit jail because facial recognition technology suggested he was a criminal. The match was wrong, and Williams sued.
On Friday, as part of a legal settlement for his wrongful arrest, Williams won 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 Williams, said should be the new national standard.
“We hope this moves the needle in the right direction,” Williams said.
Mr. Williams was the first person known to have been wrongfully arrested because of faulty facial recognition. But he was not the last. Detroit police have arrested at least two other people as a result of facial recognition searches gone wrong, including a woman who was charged with carjacking when she was eight months pregnant.
Law enforcement agencies across the country are using facial recognition technology to try to identify criminals whose misdeeds are caught on camera. In Michigan, the software compares an unknown face to those in a database of mugshots or driver’s licenses. In other jurisdictions, police use tools, such as Clearview AI, that search through photos scraped from social media sites and the Internet.
One of the most important new rules adopted in Detroit is that images of people identified by facial recognition technology can no longer be shown to an eyewitness in a photo lineup unless there is other evidence linking them to the crime.
“The ‘take a picture, put it in a lineup’ process will end,” said Phil Mayor, an attorney with the ACLU of Michigan. “This settlement takes the Detroit Police Department from being the best-documented misuser of facial recognition technology to a national leader in having guardrails in its use.”
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, Oregon, have temporarily banned its use because of concerns about privacy and racial bias. Stephen Lamoreaux, chief information officer for Detroit’s criminal intelligence unit, said the Police Department was “very interested in using the technology in a meaningful way for public safety.” Detroit, he said, has “the strongest policy in the country right now.”
How it goes wrong
Mr. Williams was arrested after a crime that occurred in 2018. A man stole five watches from a boutique in downtown Detroit while being recorded by a surveillance camera. A loss prevention company provided the images to the Detroit Police Department.
A search of the man’s face in driver’s license and mugshot photos yielded 243 photos, ranked by how certain the system was that he was the same person as in the surveillance video, according to documents unsealed as part of Mr. Williams’ lawsuit. An old driver’s license photo of Mr. Williams was ninth on the list. The person who conducted the search deemed it the best match and sent a report to a Detroit police detective.
The detective included Williams’ photo in a “six-pack photo line up” that he showed to the security contractor who had provided the store’s surveillance video. She agreed that Williams was the one who most resembled the man in the boutique, and this led to the warrant for her arrest. Williams, who was at his desk at an auto supply company when the watches were stolen, spent the night in jail and had her fingerprints and DNA taken. He was accused of retail fraud and had to hire a lawyer to defend himself. Prosecutors ultimately dismissed the case.
He sued Detroit in 2021, hoping to force a ban on the technology so others wouldn’t suffer his fate. She said she was upset last year when she learned that Detroit police had charged Porcha Woodruff with auto theft and robbery after a bad facial recognition match. Police arrested Ms. Woodruff while she was preparing her children for school. She has also sued the city; The lawsuit is ongoing.
“It’s very dangerous,” Williams said, referring to facial recognition technology. “I don’t see any positive benefit to it.”
The new rules
Detroit police are responsible for three of the seven known cases in which facial recognition has led to a wrongful arrest (the others were in Louisiana, New Jersey, Maryland and Texas). But Detroit officials said the new controls would prevent further abuses and remain optimistic about the potential of the technology to solve crimes, which they now use only in cases of serious crimes, including assaults, murders and burglaries.
Detroit Police Chief James White has blamed “human error” for the wrongful arrests. His officers, he said, relied too much on clues produced by technology. It was his judgment that failed, not the machine’s.
The new policy, which went into effect this month, is supposed to help achieve that. Under the new rules, police can no longer show a person’s face to an eyewitness based solely on a facial recognition match.
“There has to be some kind of unrelated secondary corroborating evidence before there is enough justification to go to the lineup,” he said. Mr. Lamoreaux of Detroit’s criminal intelligence unit said police would need information about the location of a person’s phone, for example, or DNA evidence, more than just a physical resemblance.
The department is also changing the way it conducts facial recognition lineups. It is adopting what is called a double-blind lineup, which is considered a fairer way to identify someone. Instead of presenting a “six-pack” to a witness, an officer (who doesn’t know who the prime suspect is) presents the photos one at a time. And the facial recognition lineup includes a different photo of the person than the one revealed by the facial recognition system.
Police will also need to disclose that a facial search was conducted, as well as the quality of the image of the face being 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 reveal the age of the photo that appeared in the automated system and whether there were other photos of the person in the database that did not match.
Detroit Deputy Police Chief Franklin Hayes said he was confident the new practices would prevent future misidentifications.
“There are still some things that can go unnoticed, for example, identical twins,” Hayes said. “We can never say never, but we believe this is our best policy yet.”
Arun Ross, a computer science professor at Michigan State University and an expert 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 trample on people’s rights and privacy, but we also don’t want crime to spread,” Ross said.
How much does it help?
Identifying eyewitnesses is a difficult task and police have embraced cameras and facial recognition as more reliable tools than imperfect human memory.
Chief White told local lawmakers last year that facial recognition technology had helped “take 16 murderers off the street.” When asked for more information, Police Department officials did not provide details about those cases.
Instead, to demonstrate the department’s successes with technology, police 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 keeps track of its facial recognition searches and submits weekly reports on its use to an oversight board. Over the past few years, he has conducted an average of more than 100 searches a year, and about half of those searches revealed potential matches.
The department only keeps track of how often it gets a tip, not whether the tip turns out to be true. But as part of his settlement with Williams (who also received $300,000, according to a police spokesperson), he has to conduct an audit of his facial recognition searches dating back to when he started using the technology in 2017. If he identifies other In cases where people have been detained with little or no supporting evidence beyond a facial match, the department is supposed to alert the appropriate prosecutor.
Molly Kleinman, director of a technology research center at the University of Michigan, said the new protections seemed promising, but she remained skeptical.
“Detroit is an extraordinarily policed city. There are cameras everywhere,” she stated. “If all this surveillance technology really did what it promises, 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 still opposed police use of facial recognition technology. .
“The technology is not ready yet,” Burton said. “One false arrest is already one too many, and the fact that there are three in Detroit should raise the alarm for it to be discontinued.”
