By: Robert Williams
This op-ed originally appeared in TIME Magazine 06/28/24
On January 9, 2020, Detroit Police Department (DPD) officers arrested me on my front lawn in Farmington Hills, Michigan, in front of my wife and two young daughters, for a crime I had nothing to do with. They refused to tell me why, and I had to spend the night sleeping on a cold concrete bench in an overcrowded, filthy jail cell before finally finding out that I was being falsely accused of stealing designer watches from a Detroit boutique.
While interrogating me, a pair of detectives let it slip that I had been arrested based on an incorrect facial recognition identification, a technology that has been proven to be both racist and faulty—especially when used in real-world conditions, like with blurry security footage.
This week we finally reached a settlement in my wrongful arrest lawsuit against the City of Detroit that ensures what happened to me won’t happen again.
Facial recognition technology has access to massive databases with millions of photos — including, at the time I was arrested, a database of 49 million photographs comprising every Michigan driver’s license photo going back years. Anyone who has a driver’s license can be included in these databases. The technology scans them all for similar-looking faces and spits out some possible suspects. Police would tell you they only use this information as a “lead” and then conduct meaningful investigations but my own personal experience, and that of other wrongfully arrested people around the country, refutes that assertion.