In January 2020, Robert Williams spent 30 hours in a Detroit prison after facial recognition technology suggested he was a criminal. The match was wrong, and Williams sued.
On Friday, as part of a legal settlement over wrongful arrest, Mr. Williams received a promise from the Detroit Police Department that it would 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, says should become a new national standard.
“We hope it moves the needle in the right direction,” Mr Williams said.
Mr Williams was the first person to be wrongfully arrested due to a facial recognition error. But it wasn’t the last. Detroit police arrested at least two people after a facial recognition search went wrong, including a woman accused of carjacking when she was eight months pregnant.
Law enforcement agencies across the country are using facial recognition technology to try to identify criminals whose crimes are caught on camera. In Michigan, software compares unknown faces to faces in a database of mugshots or driver’s license photos. In other jurisdictions, police use tools like Clearview AI, which searches for photos scraped from social media sites and the public internet.
One of the most significant new rules adopted in Detroit is that images of people identified through facial recognition technology can no longer be shown to witnesses unless there is other evidence linking them to a crime.
“This will end the ‘photo-and-lineup’ pipeline,” said Phil Mayor, staff attorney for the ACLU of Michigan. “This settlement transforms the Detroit Police Department from one of the most well-documented misusers of facial recognition technology to a national leader in using guardrails.”
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 over privacy and racial bias concerns. Stephen Lamoreaux, director of information science for Detroit’s crime intelligence unit, said the department is “very committed to using technology in a meaningful way for public safety.” He said Detroit has “the strongest policy in the country right now.”
How it goes wrong
Mr. Williams was arrested for a crime that occurred in 2018. A man stole five watches from a downtown Detroit boutique and was caught on surveillance camera. A loss prevention company provided the footage to the Detroit Police Department.
According to documents released as part of Mr. Williams’ lawsuit, a search of the man’s face based on his driver’s license photo and mugshot produced 243 photos, which were ranked based on the system’s confidence that the person in the surveillance video was the same person. It was ranked. Mr. Williams’ old driver’s license photo came in at number nine on the list. The man conducting the search considered him the best match and sent a report to Detroit police investigators.
Detectives included Williams’s photo in a “six-pack lineup” (photos of six people in a row) that they showed to a security contractor who provided surveillance video from the store. She agreed that Williams was the closest person to the man in the boutique, which led to a warrant being issued for his arrest. Williams, who was sitting at his desk at an auto parts store when the watch was stolen, spent a night in jail and had his fingerprints and DNA taken. He was charged with retail fraud and had to hire an attorney to defend himself. Prosecutors eventually dismissed the case.
He sued Detroit in 2021 to enforce a ban on the technology so others wouldn’t suffer his fate. He said he was upset when he learned last year that Detroit police had charged Woodruff with carjacking and robbery because the facial recognition match didn’t work. Police arrested Woodruff as she was walking her children to school. She also sued the city, and the lawsuit is ongoing.
“It’s just too risky,” Williams said of facial recognition technology. “I don’t see any positive benefit in it.”
new rules
Detroit police are responsible for three of the seven false arrests attributed to facial recognition. (The others were in Louisiana, New Jersey, Maryland and Texas.) But Detroit officials say the new regulations will prevent more abuses. And they remain optimistic about the technology’s potential to solve crimes, although it is currently limited to serious crimes such as assaults, murders and home invasions.
Detroit Police Chief James White blamed “human error” for the wrongful arrests. His officers, he said, rely too much on leads generated by technology. It was their judgment that was flawed, not the machine’s.
A new policy that comes into effect this month is expected to help with this. Under the new rules, police can no longer show a person’s face to witnesses based solely on a facial recognition match.
“There has to be some sort of secondary corroborating evidence before there’s sufficient justification to put someone in a lineup,” he said. This is Mr. Lamoreaux of the Detroit Criminal Intelligence Unit. Police need more than just physical similarities, such as location information from a person’s phone or DNA evidence, for example.
The department is also changing how it conducts photo lineups. It employs a double-blind sequential approach, which is considered a fairer way to identify someone. Instead of presenting a ‘six pack’ to a witness, a police officer who doesn’t know who the main suspect is is presented with one photo at a time. And the lineup included a photo of a different person than what was shown in the facial recognition system.
Police must also disclose that a face search was conducted and the quality of the facial images retrieved (how blurry was the surveillance camera? How visible is the suspect’s face?). This is because low-quality images are unlikely to produce reliable results. The automated system must also disclose the age of the photos retrieved and whether there are other photos that do not match the database.
Detroit Police Chief Franklin Hayes said he is confident the new practices will prevent future misidentifications.
“There are still some things you can make mistakes with, for example identical twins,” Mr. Hayes said. “I’m not saying there will never be one, but I think this is our best policy.”
Arun Ross, a facial recognition technology expert and computer science professor at Michigan State University, said Detroit’s policy is a good starting point and other institutions should adopt it.
“We don’t want to trample on individual rights and privacy, but we also don’t want crime to be rampant,” Mr. Ross said.
How helpful is it?
Identifying witnesses is difficult, and police have embraced cameras and facial recognition as more reliable tools than the imperfect human memory.
Chief White told local lawmakers last year that facial recognition technology helped “take 16 murderers off the streets.” When asked for more information, police officials declined to provide details about the case.
Instead, police officials played surveillance footage of a man dousing a gas station with fuel and setting it on fire to show the department’s success with the technology. They said he was identified by facial recognition technology and arrested that night. He later pleaded guilty.
The Detroit Police Department is one of the few that monitors facial recognition searches and submits weekly reports on its use to the Board of Supervisors. Over the past few years, we’ve averaged over 100 searches per year, with about half of those resulting in potential matches.
The department only tracks how often leads are obtained, not whether leads are lost. But as part of the settlement with Williams, which received $300,000, police must conduct an audit of facial recognition searches dating back to 2017, when they first began using the technology, according to a police spokeswoman. If people are arrested with little or no supporting evidence other than a facial match, the department must notify the relevant prosecutor.
Molly Kleinman, director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Technology Research, said the new safeguards look promising, but she remains skeptical.
“Detroit is a very surveillance city. There are cameras everywhere,” he said. “If all this surveillance technology actually works as claimed, Detroit would be one of the safest cities in America.”
Willie Burton, a member of the Police Board, the oversight group that approved the new policy, described it as “a step in the right direction” but still opposed police use of facial recognition technology.
“The technology is not ready yet,” Burton said. “One false arrest is one false arrest too many, and when three people are arrested in Detroit, it should be a wake-up call to stop this.”
