The city of Detroit has agreed to settle a $300,000 compensation for a man who was wrongly accused of theft due to a mistake by a facial recognition technology.
The city is also working on improving its facial recognition technology, especially when used to solve crimes.
Detroit Settles Facial Recognition Mishap That Charged Innocent
Robert Williams was mistakenly arrested for allegedly stealing watches that cost thousands of dollars in 2020. The Detroit police flagged his licensed photo as a match for the grainy surveillance footage of the crime through a facial recognition system.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative at the University of Michigan Law School announced the lawsuit agreement. The union argued that the technology is flawed and racially biased.
The ACLU also stated that the police force can still use the improved facial recognition technology as a lead. However, they must provide old-fashioned police work and collect evidence to justify the charges.
Detroit Prohibits Facial Recognition as Main Evidence
In a letter to the California assembly's public safety last year, Williams wrote that the police should not use face recognition matches as the sole evidence to charge someone with a crime.
"They should have collected corroborating evidence such as an eyewitness identification, cell phone location data, or a fingerprint. They had none of that - just an out-of-focus image of a large Black man in a baseball cap that a faulty algorithm had determined was me," he added.
Detroit police are now prohibited from arresting people based on facial recognition results only.
The agreement also stated that the police must review possible similar cases from 2017 to 2023 and a prosecutor must be notified if an arrest was made without independent evidence.
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