In January 2020, Robert Williams spent 30 hours in a Detroit jail because facial recognition technology suggested he was a criminal. The match was erroneous and Williams filed a lawsuit.
On Friday, in the framework of a Legal agreement Following 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.
Williams was the first person wrongfully detained because of a facial recognition error, but she 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 public 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 process of 'take a picture, put it in a lineup' will end,” said Phil Mayor, an attorney with the ACLU of Michigan. “This settlement moves the Detroit Police Department from being the most well-documented misuser of facial recognition technology to becoming a national leader in having guardrails around 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 due to concerns about privacy and racial bias. Stephen Lamoreaux, chief information officer of Detroit's criminal intelligence unit, said the Police Department was “very interested in using technology in a meaningful way for public safety.” Detroit, he claimed, has “the strongest politics 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 photographs of his driver's license and police record turned up 243 photos, ordered by the system's degree of certainty that it was the same person who appeared in the surveillance video, according to the documents revealed. as part of Mr. Williams' lawsuit. An old photo of Williams' driver's license was ninth on the list. The person who conducted the search felt it was 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.
In 2021, he sued Detroit in hopes of forcing a ban on the technology so others wouldn’t suffer his fate. He said he was upset last year when he learned 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 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 in it.”
The new rules
Detroit police are responsible for three of 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 abuse. And they remain optimistic about the technology’s potential to solve crimes, which they now use only in serious crime cases, including assaults, murders and home invasions.
Detroit Police Chief James White has blamed “human error” for the wrongful arrests. His officers, he said, relied too heavily on the tips the technology produced. It was their judgment that failed, not the machine’s.
The new policy, which came 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 the Detroit Criminal Intelligence Unit. Police would need location information from a person's phone, for example, or DNA evidence, more than just a physical resemblance.
The department is also changing the way it conducts photo selection. It’s moving to what’s called double-blind sequential, 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 by one. And the lineup includes a photo of the person other than the one the facial recognition system showed up with.
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 could fail, for example identical twins,” Hayes said. “We can never say never, but we feel this is our best policy so far.”
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 don't want crime to be rampant either,” Ross said.
How much does it help?
Eyewitness identification is a tense effort, and police have embraced cameras and facial recognition as more reliable tools than imperfect human memory.
White Chief said Last year, local lawmakers said facial recognition technology had helped “take 16 killers off the streets.” 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 officials played a role x.com/PGLDetroit/status/1562142189974700033″ title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>Surveillance video of a man who dumped fuel inside a gas station and set it on fire. They said he had been identified with facial recognition technology and arrested that night. The later pleaded guilty.
The Detroit Police Department is one of the few that keeps track of its facial recognition searches and sends them weekly reports about its use to an oversight board. In recent years, it has averaged more than 100 searches a year, with about half of those searches revealing potential matches.
The department only keeps track of how often it gets a tip, not whether the tip is successful. But as part of its settlement with Williams — who also received $300,000, according to a police spokesperson — it has to conduct an audit of its facial recognition searches dating back to when it began using the technology in 2017. If it identifies other cases where people were arrested with little or no other 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 sounded promising, but she remained skeptical.
“Detroit is an extraordinarily policed city. There are cameras everywhere,” he said. “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 the use of facial recognition technology by police. .
“The technology is not ready yet,” Burton said. “One false arrest is one too many, and the fact that there are three in Detroit should ring the alarm for it to be discontinued.”
