"How can I explain to two little girls that a computer was wrong but that the police still listened to it? An African-American was wrongfully arrested for 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. He had been arrested and handcuffed in front of his house, in the presence of his wife and two daughters aged 2 and 5, he wrote in a column published by the Washington Post .
"I hope you don't think all black men are alike"
According to his account, after a night in a cell, agents asked him if he had ever gone 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 alike'. The police looked at each other and one said "the computer must have been wrong", "he said.
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.
Microsoft, Amazon and IBM distance themselves
According to an MIT study, the error rate is 35% for black women. While this racial bias linked to databases comprising more white models than black is known, no specific case of error had so far 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 .
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.
Boston city council on the Atlantic coast on Wednesday voted to ban city officials from using facial recognition, making it the second largest city in the world after San Francisco in the west to make the decision . In the administrative complaint filed in Detroit, the powerful civil rights association ACLU asked the city to in turn give up this technology, but also that the criminal record of Robert Williams be purged of any reference to this incident.
By the Web
Facial recognition: "It is a mass surveillance tool that will dehumanize social relations", estimates La Quadrature du Net
- United States
- Facial recognition
- World