On January 9, 2020, Detroit Police Department (DPD) officers arrested me on the lawn of my home in Farmington Hills, Michigan, in front of my wife and two young daughters, for a crime I had nothing to do with. to see. They refused to tell me why, and I had to spend the night sleeping on a cold concrete bench in a filthy, overcrowded cell before I finally discovered I was being falsely accused of stealing designer watches from a Detroit boutique.
While questioning me, two detectives blurted out that I had been arrested based on a misidentification from facial recognition, a technology that has proven to be racist and flawed, especially when used in real-world conditions, such as with blurred security. video images.
This week we finally reached a settlement in my wrongful arrest lawsuit against the city of Detroit that ensures what happened to me will not happen again.
Facial recognition technology has access to huge databases of millions of photos — including, at the time I was arrested, a database of 49 million photographs that encompasses every Michigan driver’s license photo from years ago. Anyone who has a driver’s license can be included in these databases. The technology checks them all for similar faces and reveals some possible suspects. The police would say they simply use this information as a “lead” and then conduct meaningful investigations, but my personal experience, and that of other wrongfully arrested people across the country, refutes that claim.
Case in point, the system somehow returned the photo of my expired driver’s license as an “investigative lead” that might match the thief. Instead of investigating the veracity of this supposed correspondence, the police accepted the “lead,” placing my photo in a line along with five other photos of black men – each of whom looked any less as the thief, since a computer algorithm did not decide those ones the photos looked similar enough for the thief to be a possible match. The witness (who hadn’t even seen the crime happen, but only reviewed the security footage) chose my photo from this fraudulent list. And that’s all the evidence DPD relied on to arrest me.
See more information: Artificial intelligence has problems with racial and gender bias. See how to resolve this
When I was finally released after 30 hours, I discovered that my oldest daughter had lost her first tooth while I was in prison – a precious childhood memory now distorted by trauma for our entire family. She also showed a photograph of our family because she couldn’t bear to see my face after seeing the police take me away. The girls even started playing cops and robbers and telling me I was the thief. There have been many moments over the past four years when I have had to try to explain to two little girls that a computer mistakenly sent their father to prison.
The false charges were eventually dropped, but not before I had to go to court to defend myself for something I didn’t do. As soon as they were discarded, I demanded that the police officers apologize and urged them to stop using this dangerous technology. They ignored me.
Since my story became public in 2020, we have learned of two other Black people in Detroit, Porcha Woodruff It is michael oliverwho were also wrongfully imprisoned for crimes they did not commit based on police reliance on faulty facial recognition technology research. Similar stories continue to appear across the country.
In a fairer world, police officers would be completely prohibited from using this technology. While this agreement can only go so far, DPD’s use of this dangerous and racist technology will now be much more strictly controlled. They will not be able to make a photo lineup based solely on clues derived from facial recognition. Instead, they will only be able to conduct a lineup after using facial recognition if they first discover independent evidence linking the person identified by facial recognition to a crime. In other words, DPD can no longer replace facial recognition for basic investigative police work.
Your obligations don’t stop there. Whenever DPD uses facial recognition in an investigation, it must inform the courts and prosecutors of any flaws and weaknesses in the facial recognition research it has carried out, such as poor photo quality, as in my case where security footage was used. granulated. DPD will also, for the first time, have to train its officers on the limitations and inaccuracies of facial recognition technology, including how it falsely identifies people of color in much higher rates than whites.
What the Detroit Police Department made me endure changed my life forever. When I was taken to prison, I felt like I was in a bad movie that I couldn’t get out of. In recent years, since my wrongful arrest, my family and I have traveled throughout Michigan and across the country, urging lawmakers to protect their constituents from the horror I experienced by stopping law enforcement from misusing this technology. I have explained repeatedly that I do not want anyone to live with the fear and trauma that facial recognition technology has inflicted on my family. With the resolution of my case, we take a big step towards that goal.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
