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The Detroit Police Department can no longer use facial recognition results as its only basis for an arrest.The new rule comes after the city reached a settlement this week with a Black man who was wrongfully arrested in 2020 after he was incorrectly identified by the technology. The new rule doesn’t mean that officers can’t use facial recognition as part of their process; it only dictates that it can’t be used as the sole basis for a person’s arrest. Under the agreement, police are also not allowed to conduct a lineup based solely on facial-recognition results.In the Detroit case, Robert Williams was incorrectly identified as a shoplifting suspect based on an expired driver’s license photo. In an op-ed posted on Time Saturday, Williams noted that facial-recognition technology has been proven to be “both racist and faulty – especially when used in real-world conditions, like with blurry security footage.”In Williams’ case, grainy security footage was compared to driver’s license photos. When his photo showed up as a potential match, officers created a lineup where his face looked more like the perpetrator than any of the other men included. He was then picked out of that lineup not by someone who witnessed the crime, but by someone who had only seen the grainy security footage.Williams says, “Whenever DPD uses facial recognition in an investigation, they must inform courts and prosecutors about any flaws and weaknesses of the facial recognition search they conducted, such as poor photo quality like in my case where grainy security footage was used.”As part of the agreement, officers will also have to be trained on the limits and inaccuracies of facial-recognition technology, including the fact that it falsely identifies Black people more often than others.
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“This settlement finally brings justice to Detroit, and the Williams family, after years of fighting to expose the flaws of this dangerous technology,” Phil Mayor, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Michigan, said in a statement. “Police reliance on shoddy technology merely creates shoddy investigations. Under this settlement, the Detroit Police Department should transform from being a nationwide leader in wrongful arrests driven by facial recognition technology into being a leader in implementing meaningful guardrails to constrain and limit their use of the technology.”The new agreement may not last that long. The court can only enforce the agreement for four years, after which police could potentially go back to using the technology as its sole means to make an arrest.
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