A hot potato: Detroit police will no longer make arrests based only on facial recognition software results. The change is part of a settlement in a lawsuit that saw a man wrongfully arrested after the technology misidentified him as a theft suspect.
Robert Williams was arrested in January 2020 after his drivers' license photo was flagged as a likely match to a man seen stealing designer watches from a store in 2018. During questioning, Williams was told he was being arrested based solely on the results of a facial recognition lineup.
In a subsequent lawsuit that was settled on Friday, the city of Detroit agreed to pay Williams $300,000 and change the way it uses facial recognition technology (FRT).
"We are extremely excited that going forward there will be more safeguards on the use of this technology with our hope being to live in a better world because of it," Williams told reporters, "even though what we would like for them to do is not use it at all."
The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented Williams, said facial recognition tends to misidentify people of color.
There have been other wrongful arrests in which the technology was used, including a woman who was eight months pregnant accused of robbery and carjacking, and a man accused of property damage.
As part of the settlement, the city agreed that any "FRT lead, combined with a lineup identification, may never be a sufficient basis for seeking an arrest warrant." Investigators must ensure that further independent and reliable evidence links a suspect to a crime.
"They can get a facial-recognition lead and then they can go out and do old-fashioned police work and see if there's actually any reason to believe that the person who was identified [...] might have committed a crime," said Phil Mayor, an ACLU attorney.
Police will also receive training on the technology, including its risks and the fact it misidentifies people of color at higher rates, the ACLU said.
The agreement says that Detroit police will look at cases between 2017 and 2023 in which facial recognition technology was used. If police learn that an arrest was made without independent evidence, a prosecutor will be notified.
The court can enforce the settlement agreement only for four years. It's unclear if the police will continue to maintain the new policy once this period has expired.
According to studies, facial recognition software produces more errors when the subjects are female, Black, and 18 to 30 years old.
The ACLU noted that the same algorithm produced false positive rates for Black men more than three times the false match rate for white men at various thresholds.
Center image: Burst