An African American was wrongfully arrested because of police use of facial recognition technology, the first such error documented in the United States, according to a complaint filed in Detroit on Wednesday. In early January, Robert Williams spent 30 hours in detention because software had deemed the photo of his driver's license and the image of a watch thief captured by surveillance cameras identical, according to this complaint.
Arrested and handcuffed in front of his house
He had been arrested and handcuffed in front of his house, in the presence of his wife and two daughters, ages 2 and 5. "How to explain to two little girls that a computer was wrong but that the police still listened to it?", He wrote in a column published by the Washington Post.
According to his account, after a night in a cell, agents asked him if he had ever been to a jewelry store in Detroit, a large industrial city in the north, and showed him two blurred photos of a black man. "I took the paper and put it close to my face saying 'I hope you don't think all black men are the same'. The police looked at each other and one of them looked says 'the computer must have been wrong', "he says.
Face recognition technology accused of unreliability
Facial recognition technology, used for several years by various police services in the United States without a federal legal framework, is accused of being unreliable in the identification of minorities, especially black or Asian. However, no specific case of error had hitherto been documented.
Since the death of George Floyd, a black 40-year-old asphyxiated by a white police officer in Minneapolis on May 28, the Americans have demanded, during demonstrations throughout the country, police reforms and the militants advocate in particular for the abandonment of this technology .
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Several companies want to respond to the mobilization
Several companies, anxious to respond to this mobilization, such as Amazon, IBM or Microsoft have suspended the sale of this identification software to the police, until clear rules have not been set. Cities like San Francisco or Springfield have also given up on this technology.
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The powerful civil rights association ACLU lodged an administrative complaint Wednesday on behalf of Robert Williams in front of the city hall of Detroit to obtain that his criminal record is purged of any reference to this incident and to demand the abandonment of the facial recognition by the city police.