In January 2020, Robert Williams spent 30 hours in a Detroit jail because facial recognition technology suggested he was a criminal. The match was wrong, and Mr. Williams sued.
On Friday, as part of a legal settlement over his wrongful arrest, Mr. Williams won a commitment from the Detroit Police Department to do better. The city adopted new rules for police use of facial recognition technology that the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented Mr. Williams, said should become the new national standard.
“We hope this moves the needle in the right direction,” Mr Williams said.
Mr. Williams was the first known person to be wrongfully arrested because of faulty facial recognition. But he wasn’t the last. Detroit police have arrested at least two other people following botched facial recognition searches, including a woman who was 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 misdeeds are caught on camera. In Michigan, the software compares an unfamiliar face to those in a database of mugshots or driver's license photos. In other jurisdictions, police use tools, such as Clearview AI, that search through photos taken from social media sites and the public internet.
One of the most notable new rules adopted in Detroit is that images of people identified through facial recognition technology can no longer be shown to an eyewitness in a mug shot unless there is other evidence linking them to the crime.
“The process of 'take a picture, put it in the lineup' will end,” said Phil Mayor, an attorney for the ACLU of Michigan. “This settlement transforms the Detroit Police Department from being the best-documented abusive user of facial recognition technology to a national leader in the use of 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 due to concerns about privacy and racial bias. Stephen Lamoreaux, chief of information technology at Detroit’s criminal intelligence unit, said the police department was “very keen to use the technology in a meaningful way for public safety.” Detroit, he said, has “the strongest policy in the nation right now.”
How it goes wrong
Mr. Williams was arrested after a crime in 2018. A man stole five watches from a boutique in downtown Detroit while being caught on surveillance camera. A loss prevention company provided the footage to the Detroit Police Department.
A search of the man's face by comparing driver's license photos and mugshots yielded 243 photos, ranked in order of how certain the system was that it was the same person in the surveillance video, according to documents disclosed as part of the lawsuit Mr. Williams. An old photo of Mr Williams' driving license was ninth on the list. The person who conducted the search deemed it the best match and sent a report to a Detroit police detective.
The detective included Mr. Williams' photo in a “six-photo set” — photos of six people in a rack — that he showed to the security contractor who had provided the store's surveillance video. He agreed that Mr Williams was the closest person to the man in the boutique, and this led to the arrest warrant. 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 ultimately dropped the case.
He sued Detroit in 2021, hoping to force a ban on the technology so others wouldn’t suffer his fate. He said he was shocked last year when he learned that Detroit police had charged Porcha Woodruff with carjacking and robbery after a botched facial recognition test. Police arrested Woodruff as she was getting her children ready for school. He also sued the city; the lawsuit is ongoing.
“It’s so dangerous,” Williams said, referring to facial recognition technology. “I don’t see any positive benefit from it.”
The new rules
Detroit police are responsible for three of the seven known cases in which facial recognition led to a wrongful arrest. (The others occurred in Louisiana, New Jersey, Maryland and Texas.) But Detroit officials said the new controls would prevent further abuse. And they remain optimistic about the crime-solving potential of the technology, which they now use only in serious crimes, including assault, homicide and home invasions.
Detroit Police Chief James White blamed “human error” for the wrongful arrests. His officers, he said, relied too heavily on technology-generated cues. It was their judgment that was flawed, not the machine’s.
The new policy, which goes into effect this month, should help. Under the new rules, police can no longer show a person’s face to an eyewitness based solely on facial recognition.
“There has to be some sort of confirmatory secondary evidence that is uncorrelated before there is sufficient justification to go to training,” he said. Mr. Lamoreaux of the Detroit Criminal Intelligence Unit. The police would need location information from a person’s phone, for example, or DNA evidence, more than a physical resemblance.
The department is also changing how it conducts photography trainings. It is adopting what is called a double-blind sequence, which is considered a fairer way to identify someone. Instead of presenting a “six-pack” to a witness, an officer, who doesn't know who the prime suspect is, presents the photos one at a time. And the training includes a different photo of the person than the one that emerged from the facial recognition system.
Police will also have to disclose that a facial search was conducted, as well as the quality of the image of the face searched (how grainy was 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 that came up through the automated system and whether there were other photos of the person in the database that did not match.
Franklin Hayes, Detroit's deputy police chief, said he was confident the new practices would prevent future misidentifications.
“There are still some things that could slip through, for example, identical twins,” Mr. Hayes said. “We can never say never, but we think this is our best policy yet.”
Arun Ross, a computer science professor at Michigan State University and an expert in facial recognition technology, said Detroit's policy is a great starting point and that other agencies should adopt it.
“We don’t want to trample on the rights and privacy of individuals, but we also don’t want crime to become rampant,” Ross said.
How much does it help?
Eyewitness identification is a tall order, and police have adopted cameras and facial recognition as more reliable tools than imperfect human memory.
Chief White told local lawmakers last year that facial recognition technology had helped “take 16 killers off the streets.” When asked for more information, Police Department officials did not provide details about those cases.
Instead, to demonstrate the department’s success with the technology, officers played surveillance video of a man spraying gasoline inside a gas station and setting it on fire. They said he was identified with facial recognition technology and arrested that night. He later pleaded guilty.
The Detroit Police Department is one of the few that keeps tabs on facial recognition research, submitting weekly reports on its use to an oversight board. In past years, it averaged more than 100 searches per year, of which about half yielded potential matches.
The department tracks only how often it gets a lead, not whether the lead works. But as part of its settlement with Mr. Williams, who also received $300,000, according to a police spokeswoman, it must conduct an audit of his facial recognition searches dating back to when he began using the technology in 2017. If it identifies additional cases in which people were arrested with little or no supporting evidence other than a facial match, the department is supposed to notify the appropriate prosecutor.
Molly Kleinman, director of a technology research center at the University of Michigan, said the new protections look promising, but she remains skeptical.
“Detroit is an extraordinarily surveilled city. There are cameras everywhere,” he said. “If all this surveillance technology actually did what it says it would, 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 policies, described them as “a step in the right direction,” although he was still opposed to the use of facial recognition technology by police.
“The technology is not there yet,” Burton said. “One false arrest is one too many, and having three in Detroit should be a wake-up call to stop it.”