Current Events > Facial recognition tech leads police to arrest man for crime he didn't commit

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recognition-arrest.html?auth=login-facebook

On a Thursday afternoon in January, Robert Julian-Borchak Williams was in his office at an automotive supply company when he got a call from the Detroit Police Department telling him to come to the station to be arrested. He thought at first that it was a prank.

An hour later, when he pulled into his driveway in a quiet subdivision in Farmington Hills, Mich., a police car pulled up behind, blocking him in. Two officers got out and handcuffed Mr. Williams on his front lawn, in front of his wife and two young daughters, who were distraught. The police wouldnt say why he was being arrested, only showing him a piece of paper with his photo and the words felony warrant and larceny.

His wife, Melissa, asked where he was being taken. Google it, she recalls an officer replying.

The police drove Mr. Williams to a detention center. He had his mug shot, fingerprints and DNA taken, and was held overnight. Around noon on Friday, two detectives took him to an interrogation room and placed three pieces of paper on the table, face down.

Whens the last time you went to a Shinola store? one of the detectives asked, in Mr. Williamss recollection. Shinola is an upscale boutique that sells watches, bicycles and leather goods in the trendy Midtown neighborhood of Detroit. Mr. Williams said he and his wife had checked it out when the store first opened in 2014.

The detective turned over the first piece of paper. It was a still image from a surveillance video, showing a heavyset man, dressed in black and wearing a red St. Louis Cardinals cap, standing in front of a watch display. Five timepieces, worth $3,800, were shoplifted.

Is this you? asked the detective.

The second piece of paper was a close-up. The photo was blurry, but it was clearly not Mr. Williams. He picked up the image and held it next to his face.

No, this is not me, Mr. Williams said. You think all black men look alike?

Mr. Williams knew that he had not committed the crime in question. What he could not have known, as he sat in the interrogation room, is that his case may be the first known account of an American being wrongfully arrested based on a flawed match from a facial recognition algorithm, according to experts on technology and the law.

A nationwide debate is raging about racism in law enforcement. Across the country, millions are protesting not just the actions of individual officers, but bias in the systems used to surveil communities and identify people for prosecution.

Facial recognition systems have been used by police forces for more than two decades. Recent studies by M.I.T. and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, have found that while the technology works relatively well on white men, the results are less accurate for other demographics, in part because of a lack of diversity in the images used to develop the underlying databases.

Last year, during a public hearing about the use of facial recognition in Detroit, an assistant police chief was among those who raised concerns. On the question of false positives that is absolutely factual, and its well-documented, James White said. So that concerns me as an African-American male.

This month, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM announced they would stop or pause their facial recognition offerings for law enforcement. The gestures were largely symbolic, given that the companies are not big players in the industry. The technology police departments use is supplied by companies that arent household names, such as Vigilant Solutions, Cognitec, NEC, Rank One Computing and Clearview AI.

Clare Garvie, a lawyer at Georgetown Universitys Center on Privacy and Technology, has written about problems with the governments use of facial recognition. She argues that low-quality search images such as a still image from a grainy surveillance video should be banned, and that the systems currently in use should be tested rigorously for accuracy and bias.

There are mediocre algorithms and there are good ones, and law enforcement should only buy the good ones, Ms. Garvie said.

About Mr. Williamss experience in Michigan, she added: I strongly suspect this is not the first case to misidentify someone to arrest them for a crime they didnt commit. This is just the first time we know about it.

Mr. Williamss case combines flawed technology with poor police work, illustrating how facial recognition can go awry.

The Shinola shoplifting occurred in October 2018. Katherine Johnston, an investigator at Mackinac Partners, a loss prevention firm, reviewed the stores surveillance video and sent a copy to the Detroit police, according to their report.

Five months later, in March 2019, Jennifer Coulson, a digital image examiner for the Michigan State Police, uploaded a probe image a still from the video, showing the man in the Cardinals cap to the states facial recognition database. The system would have mapped the mans face and searched for similar ones in a collection of 49 million photos.
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p much, it's well known that tech has a big problem with a lack of diversity, so the test cases all these "big new things" go through end up with them poorly optimised for minorities

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trump's america

Not to derail from the more dystopian side of this, but do they have to destroy/dispose of prints/DNA/mugshots of people who are found to be innocent?

If not, really seems like something they should be doing and that people should push to make them do.

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"DNA taken"

What in the ever loving FUCK is this shit?
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Didn't John Oliver literally cover this a couple weeks ago? >___>

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"This never would have happened if he just complied!"

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Brilliant posted...

"DNA taken"

What in the ever loving FUCK is this shit?

Cheek swab, I'd assume.

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This is really smart of the police. Now they can blame science and technology for their racism.

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DrizztLink posted...

Cheek swab, I'd assume.

Not the procedure for taking the sample my man.

The fact that they are taking your DNA without a court order, that has to be a New York thing, and it's fucked.
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Is this really the first time a someone has been falsely arrested due to facial recognition in America? Given how poorly it works (look up the appalling UK failure rate), I'm surprised this happened. Given how flimsy the evidence was, I'd say racial bias was definitely in play. And what was up with the police phoning the guy to tell him to come in and be arrested? Is that something police actually do? It sounds like a setup to justify sending officers to follow him home for further intimidation.