Porcha Woodruff was getting her two daughters ready for school when six police officers arrived at her Detroit door. They asked him to come out because he was arrested for robbery and carjacking.
“Are you kidding?” he recalled telling the officers. said Ms. Woodruff, 32, who gestured to her stomach to indicate how ill-equipped she was to commit such a crime: She was eight months pregnant.
Handcuffed in front of his home on a Thursday morning in February, he left his crying children with his girlfriend, Ms. Woodruff was taken to the Detroit Detention Center. He said he was detained for 11 hours, questioned about a crime he said he knew nothing about, and had his iPhone taken to look for evidence.
“I’m having contractions in the holding cell. My back sends me excruciating pain. I had spasms. I think I’m probably having a panic attack,” said Ms. Woodruff, a licensed esthetician and nursing school student. “I’m in pain, sitting on concrete benches.”
After being charged in court with theft and carjacking, Ms. Woodruff that night on a $100,000 personal bond. In an interview, he said he went straight to the hospital where he was diagnosed with dehydration and given two bags of intravenous fluids. A month later, two weeks before her son was born, the Wayne County prosecutor dismissed the case against her.
The test began with an automated facial recognition search, according to a report by an investigator from the Detroit Police Department. Ms. Woodruff is the sixth person to report being falsely accused of a crime as a result of facial recognition technology used by police to match the face of an unknown offender to a photo in a database. All six people became Black; Ms. Woodruff was the first woman to report that this had happened to her.
This is the third case involving the Detroit Police Department, which conducts, on average, 125 facial recognition searches a year, almost all of them on Black men, according to weekly reports on police use of the technology provided to the Board of Detroit Police Commissioners, a civilian oversight group. Critics of the technology say the cases expose its weaknesses and the dangers it poses to innocent people.
The Detroit Police Department “is an agency that has every reason to be aware of the dangers that come with using facial recognition,” said Clare Garvie, an expert in technology at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “And it’s still happening.”
On Thursday, Ms. Woodruff filed a false arrest suit against the city of Detroit in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.
“I have reviewed the allegations contained in the lawsuit. They are very concerning,” Detroit police chief James E. White said in a statement in response to questions from The New York Times. “We are taking this matter very seriously, but cannot comment further at this time due to the need for further investigation.”
The Wayne County prosecutor, Kym Worthy, is considering an arrest warrant in the case of Ms. Woodruff was “appropriate based on the facts,” according to a statement released by his office.
The investigation
On Sunday night two and a half weeks before the police arrived at the door of Ms. Woodruff, a 25-year-old man called Detroit police from a liquor store to report he had been robbed at gunpoint, according to a police report included in Ms. Woodruff’s lawsuit. Woodruff.
The robbery victim told police he picked up a woman on the street earlier this morning. He said they were drinking together in his car, first in a liquor store parking lot, where they had sex, and then at a BP gas station. When he dropped her off at a location about 10 minutes away, a man who met her produced a gun, took the victim’s wallet and phone, and fled in the victim’s Chevy Malibu, according to the police report.
Days later, police arrested a man driving the stolen vehicle. A woman who matched the description given by the victim dropped her phone at the same BP gas station, the police report said.
A detective in the police department’s commercial auto theft unit obtained surveillance video from the BP gas station, the police report said, and asked a crime analyst at the department to run a facial recognition search on the woman.
According to city documents, the department uses a facial recognition vendor called DataWorks Plus to run anonymous faces against a database of criminal mug shots; the system returns matches ranked by their likelihood of being the same person. A human analyst is solely responsible for deciding whether any of the matches is a potential suspect. The police report said the crime analyst gave the investigator the name Ms. Woodruff based on a match in a mug shot in 2015. Ms. Woodruff in an interview that he was arrested in 2015 after being pulled over while driving with an expired license.
Five days after the carjacking, the police report said, the detective assigned to the case asked the victim to see mug shots of six Black women, commonly referred to as the “six-pack photo lineup.” With them is the picture of Ms. Woodruff. He recognized Ms. Woodruff as the woman he was with. That was the basis for his arrest, according to the police report. (Police did not say if another woman was charged in the case.)
Gary Wells, a professor of psychology who studied the reliability of eyewitness identifications, said that matching facial recognition technology to an eyewitness identification should not be the basis for charging someone with a crime. Even if that resemblance is innocent, an eyewitness asked to make the same comparison would likely repeat the mistake made by the computer.
“It’s circular and dangerous,” said Dr. Wells. “You have a very powerful tool that, if it searches for enough faces, will always produce people who look like the person in the surveillance photo..”
said Dr. Wells that technology compounds an existing problem with eyewitnesses. “They think when you show them a six-pack, the real person is there,” he says.
Serious consequences
The city of Detroit is facing three lawsuits for false arrests based on the use of the technology.
“Poor technology makes for poor investigations, and police assurances that they will conduct serious investigations are false,” said Phil Mayor, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan.
Represented by Mr. Mayor Robert Williams, a Detroit man arrested in January 2020 for shoplifting based on a faulty facial recognition match, where the prosecutor’s office later apologize.
In his lawsuit, Mr. Williams is trying to get the city to agree to collect more evidence in cases involving automated facial searches and to end what Mr. Mayor calls “facial recognition to line- up pipeline.”
“This is a very dangerous practice that has led to many false arrests that we know of,” Mr. Mayor said.
The Toll
said Ms. Woodruff said she was stressed for the rest of her pregnancy. He had to go to the police station the next day to retrieve his phone, and appeared in court hearings twice via Zoom before the case was dismissed due to insufficient evidence.
“It’s scary. I’m worried. There’s always someone who looks different,” said his attorney, Ivan L. Land. “Facial recognition is just an investigative tool. If you get hit, do your job and move on. Knock on his door.”
said Ms. Woodruff that he was embarrassed to be arrested in front of his neighbors and traumatized his daughters. They now tease her baby son that he was “in prison before he was born.”
The experience was made more difficult because she was so far along in her pregnancy, but Ms. Woodruff feels lucky. He thinks this convinced the authorities that he did not commit the crime. The woman involved in the carjacking has never been seen pregnant.
