In January 2020, Robert Williams spent 30 hours in a Detroit jail because facial recognition technology suggested he was a criminal. The fight was wrong, and Mr. Williams.
On Friday, as part of a legal agreement in his false arrest, Mr. Williams got a commitment from the Detroit Police Department to do better. The city has adopted new rules for police use of facial recognition technology that the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents Mr. Williams, which should be the new national standard.
“We hope this moves the needle in the right direction,” Mr. Williams said.
Mr. Williams is the first person known to have been falsely arrested based on false facial recognition. But he was not the last. Detroit police have arrested at least two more people as a result of facial recognition searches gone awry, including a woman 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 wrongdoings are caught on camera. In Michigan, software compares an unknown face to those in a database of mug shots or driver’s license photos. In other jurisdictions, police use tools, such as Clearview AI, that search through images scraped from social media sites and the public internet.
One of the most important new rules adopted in Detroit is that photos of people identified through facial recognition technology can no longer be shown to an eyewitness in a photo lineup unless there is other evidence linking them. in crime.
“The pipeline of ‘take a picture, slap it on a lineup’ is going to end,” said Phil Mayor, an attorney for the ACLU of Michigan. “This agreement moves the Detroit Police Department from being the best-documented misuser of facial recognition technology to becoming a national leader in having guardrails over its use.”
Police say facial recognition technology is a powerful tool for helping solve crimes, but some cities and states, including San Francisco; Austin, Texas; and Portland, Ore., temporarily banned its use due to concerns about privacy and racial bias. Stephen Lamoreaux, head of informatics at Detroit’s crime intelligence unit, said the Police Department is “very eager to use technology in a meaningful way for public safety.” Detroit, he asserts, has “the strongest policy in the country right now.”
How It Went 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 footage to the Detroit Police Department.
A search of the man’s face against driver’s license photos and mug shots produced 243 images, which were ranked in order of the system’s confidence that they were the same person in the surveillance video, according to the documents disclosed as part of the lawsuit of Mr. Williams. An old driver’s license photo for Mr. Williams is ninth on the list. The man running the search deemed him the best match, and sent a report to a Detroit police detective.
The detective included a picture of Mr. Williams in a “six-pack photo lineup” — pictures of six people in a grid — that he showed the security contractor who provided the store’s surveillance video. He agreed that Mr. Williams was the man’s closest associate at the boutique, and this led to a warrant for his arrest. Mr. Williams, who was at his desk at an automotive 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 accused Detroit in 2021 of hoping to force a ban on the technology so others wouldn’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. The police arrested Ms. Woodruff as she gets her children ready for school. He also sued the city; the suit is ongoing.
“It’s very dangerous,” Mr. Williams said, referring to facial recognition technology. “I don’t see the positive benefit of it.”
The New Rule
Detroit police were responsible for three of the seven known cases when facial recognition led to a false arrest. (The others are in Louisiana, New Jersey, Maryland and Texas.) But Detroit officials say the new controls will prevent more abuses. And they remain optimistic about the crime-solving potential of the technology, which they now only use in serious crime cases, including assault, murder and home invasion.
James White, Detroit’s police chief, blamed “human error” for the false arrests. His officers, he said, relied too much on technology-generated leads. It was their judgment that was flawed, not the machine.
The new policy, effective this month, should help with this. Under the new rules, police can no longer show a person’s face to a witness based solely on a facial recognition match.
“There has to be some kind of secondary corroborating evidence that is unrelated before there is sufficient justification to go into the lineup,” said Mr. Lamoreaux of Detroit’s crime intelligence unit. Police would need location information from a person’s phone, say, or DNA evidence — something more than physical resemblance.
The department is also changing how it conducts photo lineups. This is the use of the so-called double-blind sequential, which is considered a fairer way to identify a person. Instead of presenting a “six-pack” to a witness, an officer — one who doesn’t know who the prime suspect is — shows the photos one by one. And the lineup includes another human image from the emerging facial recognition system.
Police will also have to disclose that a face search occurred, as well as the quality of the image of the face being searched — How grainy is 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 the automated system showed, and whether there are other photos of the person in the database that didn’t come up as a match.
Franklin Hayes, Detroit’s deputy chief of police, said he is confident the new skills will prevent future misidentifications.
“There are still some things that can slip, for example, identical twins,” Mr. Hayes said. “We can’t say never, but we think it’s our best policy.”
Arun Ross, a computer science professor at Michigan State University who is an expert in facial recognition technology, said Detroit’s policy is a good starting point and should be adopted by other agencies.
“We don’t want to trample on the rights and privacy of individuals, but we also don’t want crime to be rampant,” Mr. Ross said.
How Much Does It Help?
Eyewitness identification is a full hard work, and police have embraced cameras and facial recognition as more reliable tools than imperfect human memory.
Chief White said 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 about those cases.
Instead, to showcase the department’s technological achievements, police officers played a surveillance video of a man who sprinkled gasoline inside a gas station and set it on fire. They say he was identified through facial recognition technology and arrested that night. He later plead guilty.
The Detroit Police Department is one of the few that enforces its facial recognition searches, submitting weekly report about its use in an oversight board. In recent years, it has averaged more than 100 searches a year, with about half of those searches turning up potential matches.
The department only tracks how often it gets a lead, not whether the lead is lost. But as part of its settlement with Mr. Williams — who also received $300,000, according to a police spokesman — it must conduct an audit of its facial recognition searches when it first began using the technology in 2017 .If it identifies other cases where people are arrested with little or no other supporting evidence beyond a facial match, the department should alert the relevant prosecutor.
Molly Kleinman, the director of a technology research center at the University of Michigan, said the new protections are good, but she remained skeptical.
“Detroit is an extraordinarily guarded city. There are cameras everywhere,” he said. “If all this surveillance technology really did what it says, 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 rules, described them as “a step in the right direction,” though he still opposes the use of the technology. of police facial recognition.
“The technology is not ready,” Mr. Burton said. “One false arrest is one too many, and having three in Detroit should sound the alarm to stop this.”
