of City of Detroit The city will pay $300,000 to a man who was wrongfully accused of shoplifting, and as part of the settlement, the city will also change how police use facial recognition technology to identify suspects.
Robert Williams’ driver’s license photo was incorrectly determined to be a likely match for a man seen on grainy security camera footage during a burglary at Shinola Watches in 2018. Williams was arrested two years later in front of his wife and two young daughters in the front yard of his home in Farmington Hills, a Detroit suburb.
“I’m excited to see increased safeguards around the use of this technology in the future that will help us live in a better world. But my hope is that we’ll never use this technology at all,” Williams said. Associated Press.
Williams, a Black man, was held in custody for more than 24 hours and the charges were ultimately dropped after he defended himself in court, according to the ACLU, which has said facial recognition technology is flawed, racist and has a high rate of false positives for Black people.
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The city of Detroit agreed to pay $300,000 to Robert Williams, who was wrongly accused of shoplifting using facial recognition technology. (Drew English/ACLU via The Associated Press)
Williams was one of three people, all of whom are Black, who were mistakenly arrested after Detroit police used facial recognition technology to identify suspects, the ACLU said in a statement. press release The agreement was announced.
Police Chief James White announced the new policy on facial recognition technology last August while the lawsuit was still ongoing, after an eight-month pregnant woman claimed she had been wrongly accused of carjacking.
White said at the time that police needed evidence other than technology to believe a suspect had the “means, ability and opportunity to commit a crime.”
According to the ACLU, as part of the settlement with Williams, Detroit police will be prohibited from arresting people based solely on facial recognition results, and will also be barred from making arrests based on photo sequences created by a facial recognition search.
“The Detroit Police Department’s misuse of facial recognition technology has completely turned my life upside down,” Williams said in an ACLU press release. “My wife and young daughters watched helplessly as I was arrested for a crime I didn’t commit, missed my youngest child’s tooth falling out when I came home from jail, and my oldest daughter couldn’t bear to even look at photographs of me. Years later, they still tear up when they think about it.”
Police officials also plan to conduct an audit of all cases from 2017 to 2023 in which facial recognition technology was used to obtain arrest warrants. If police determine an arrest was made without independent evidence, it will be reported to prosecutors.
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As part of the settlement, Detroit police will be prohibited from arresting people based solely on facial recognition results, and will also be barred from making arrests based on photo sequences created by facial recognition searches. (iStock)
“When police rely on bad technology, they can only produce bad investigations,” said Phil Meyer, senior attorney for the Michigan chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “This settlement should transform the Detroit Police Department from a national leader in wrongful arrests using facial recognition technology to a leader in implementing effective guardrails to limit and restrict the use of the technology.”
The mayor told The Associated Press that police could do “old-fashioned policing” to look for facial recognition clues and see if there is reason to believe the identified person may have committed a crime.
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Williams was defended by the ACLU and the University of Michigan Law School’s Civil Rights Litigation Initiative.
“We hope that this landmark settlement will not only prevent future disproportionate arrests of Black people in Detroit, but also serve as a model for other police departments advocating for the use of facial recognition technology,” said Michael J. Steinberg, director of the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative at the University of Michigan Law School.
“We are thrilled that Ms. Williams, who has become the face of the movement to stop the misuse of facial recognition, will receive some relief.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
