Detroit police challenged over face recognition flaws, bias
A Black man who was wrongfully arrested when facial recognition technology mistakenly identified him as a suspected shoplifter wants Detroit police to apologize — and to end their use of the controversial technology.
The complaint by Robert Williams is a rare challenge from someone who not only experienced an erroneous face recognition hit, but was able to discover that it was responsible for his subsequent legal troubles.
The Wednesday complaint filed on Williams' behalf alleges that his Michigan driver license photo — kept in a statewide image repository — was incorrectly flagged as a likely match to a shoplifting suspect. Investigators had scanned grainy surveillance camera footage of an alleged 2018 theft inside a Shinola watch store i n midtown Detroit, police records show.
That led to what Williams describes as a humiliating January arrest in front of his wife and young daughters on their front lawn in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills.
“I can't really even put it into words,” Williams said in a video announcement describing the daytime arrest that left his daughters weeping. “It was one of the most shocking things that I ever had happen to me.”
The 42-year-old automotive worker, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, is demanding a public apology, final dismissal of his case and for Detroit police to scrap its use of facial recognition technology. Several studies have shown current face-recognition systems more likely to err when identifying people with darker skin.
The ACLU complaint said Detroit police “unthinkingly relied on flawed and racist facial recognition technology without taking reasonable measures to verify the information being provided.” It called the resulting investigation “shoddy and incomplete,” the officers involved “rude and threatening,” and said the department has dragged its feet responding to public-information requests for relevant records.
In a written statement Wednesday, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy apologized for her office taking up the case, while noting she has long expressed reservations to Detroit police about face-recognition technology because of its unreliability, “especially as it relates to people of color.”
“This case should not have been issued based on the DPD investigation, and for that we apologize,” she said. “Thankfully, it was dismissed on our office's own motion. This does not in any way make up for the hours that Mr. Williams spent in jail.”
Detroit police declined to comment on the complaint Wednesday, citing “pending litigation.” But the department told NPR it has since enacted new rules limiting the use of facial recognition to cases involving violent crimes and only using still photos, not security camera footage.
DataWorks Plus, a South Carolina company that provides facial recognition technology to Detroit and the Michigan State Police, also didn't return requests for comment.
Police records show the case began in October 2018 when five expensive watches went missing from the flagship store of Detroit-based luxury watchmaker Shinola. A loss-prevention worker later reviewed the video footage showing the suspect to be a Black man wearing a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap.
“Video and stills were sent to Crime Intel for facial recognition,” says a brief police report. “Facial Recognition came back with a hit” — for Williams.
At the top of the facial recognition report, produced by Michigan State Police, was a warning in bold, capitalized letters that the computer's finding should be treated as an investigative lead, not as probable cause for arrest.