DETROIT (WWJ) -- A federal lawsuit has been filed on behalf of a Farmington Hills father who was wrongfully arrested and jailed based on faulty facial recognition technology used by Detroit police.
The University of Michigan Law School’s Civil Rights Litigation Initiative (CRLI), the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Michigan filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday on behalf of Robert Williams, who is suing the Detroit Police Department over his January, 2020 arrest.
The lawsuit says Williams, 43, was arrested in connection with a 2018 shoplifting incident at a Shinola watch store in Midtown Detroit in which five watches were stolen. Police attempted to use facial recognition on a blurry image taken from store surveillance video that showed a man wearing a St. Louis Cardinals baseball hat. Charges against Williams were eventually dropped.
The lawsuit cites multiple studies that show that facial recognition technology does a poor job at accurately identifying people of color -- especially in cases like this one in which lighting is poor and the suspect is not looking directly at the camera.
Williams’s arrest was the first case of wrongful arrest due to facial recognition technology to come to light in the United States, according to the lawsuit.
Williams came home from work and was arrested in his Farmington Hills driveway on January 9 in front of his wife of 11 years and two daughters. He was held 30 hours in what the lawsuit calls “a filthy Detroit detention center,” where he was forced to sleep on a cement floor due to overcrowding.
“This never should have happened, and I want to make sure that this painful experience never happens to anyone else,” Williams said in a statement.
“Cities across the country have banned police from using facial recognition technology for a reason,” said Jeremy Shur, a student attorney with CRLI, which is representing Mr. Williams. “The technology is racially biased, flawed, and easily leads to false arrests of innocent people, just like our client.”
Detroit police purchased facial recognition software in 2017 and have since implemented policies allowing officers to only use the technology on still images to identify suspects that were involved in violent crimes. A previous proposal of the policy said police could use the technology to scan faces in real time only in the event of a major threat to the city, such as a terrorist attack. The new revised policy says police cannot ever use the tech in real time.
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“We know that facial recognition technology threatens everyone’s privacy by turning everybody into a suspect,” said Phil Mayor, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Michigan, in a press release. “We’ve repeatedly urged the Detroit Police Department to abandon its use of this dangerous technology, but it insists on using it anyhow. Justice requires that DPD and its officers be held accountable.”
The lawsuit alleges Williams’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated and his wrongful arrest violated the Michigan Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act. The lawsuit is seeking damages and policy changes to stop the abuse of facial recognition technology, according to a press release from the CRLI and ACLU.
Read the entire complaint here.
The New York Times helped bring Williams's story to light with a story in June 2020, while a YouTube video from the ACLU details his arrest.