False facial recognition match led to pregnant woman’s arrest
Porcha Woodruff was getting her two daughters ready for school when six police officers showed up at her door in Detroit. They asked her to step outside because she was under arrest for robbery and carjacking.
“Are you kidding?” she recalled saying to the officers. Woodruff, 32, said she gestured at her stomach to indicate how ill-equipped she was to commit such a crime: She was eight months pregnant.
Handcuffed in front of her home on a Thursday morning in February, leaving her crying children with her fiance, Woodruff was taken to the Detroit Detention Center. She said she was held for 11 hours, questioned about a crime she said she had no knowledge of, and had her iPhone seized to be searched for evidence.
The ordeal started with an automated facial recognition search, according to an investigator’s report from the Detroit Police Department. 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 an unknown offender’s face to a photo in a database. All six people have been Black; Woodruff is the first woman to report it happening to her.
It is the third case involving the Detroit Police Department, which runs, on average, 125 facial recognition searches a year, almost entirely on Black men, according to weekly reports about the technology’s use provided by the police to Detroit’s Board of Police Commissioners, a civilian oversight group. Critics of the technology say the cases expose its weaknesses and the dangers posed to innocent people.
After being charged in court with robbery and carjacking, Woodruff was released in the evening on a $100,000 personal bond. In an interview, she said she went straight to the hospital where she was diagnosed with dehydration and given two bags of intravenous fluids. A month later, the Wayne County prosecutor dismissed the case against her.
On Thursday, Woodruff filed a lawsuit for wrongful arrest against the city of Detroit in US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.
On a Sunday night 2½ weeks before police showed up at Woodruff ’s door, a 25-year-old man called the Detroit police from a liquor store to report that he had been robbed at gunpoint, according to a police report included in Woodruff ’s lawsuit.
The robbery victim told police that he had picked up a woman on the street earlier in the day. He said that they had been drinking together in his car, first in a liquor store parking lot, where they engaged in sexual intercourse, and then at a BP gas station. When he dropped her off at a spot 10 minutes away, a man there to meet her produced a handgun, took the victim’s wallet and phone, and fled in the victim’s Chevy Malibu, the police report said.
Days later, police arrested a man driving the stolen vehicle. A woman who matched the description given by the victim dropped off his phone at the same gas station, the police report said.
A detective with the police department’s commercial auto theft unit got the 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 unknown 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 ultimately responsible for deciding if any of the matches are a potential suspect. The police report said the crime analyst gave the investigator Woodruff ’s name based on a match to a 2015 mug shot. Woodruff said in an interview that she had been arrested in 2015 after being pulled over while driving with an expired license.
The experience was all the more difficult because she was so far along in her pregnancy, but Woodruff said she feels lucky that she was. She thinks it convinced authorities that she did not commit the crime. The woman involved in the carjacking had not been visibly pregnant.