Detroit Takes Important Step in Curbing the Harms of Face Recognition Technology

In a first-of-its-kind agreement, the Detroit Police Department recently agreed to adopt strict limits on its officers’ use of face recognition technology as part of a settlement in a lawsuit brought by a victim of this faulty technology.  

Robert Williams, a Black resident of a Detroit suburb, filed suit against the Detroit Police Department after officers arrested him at his home in front of his wife, daughters, and neighbors for a crime he did not commit. After a shoplifting incident at a watch store, police used a blurry still taken from surveillance footage and ran it through face recognition technology—which incorrectly identified Williams as the perpetrator. 

Under the terms of the agreement, the Detroit Police can no longer substitute face recognition technology (FRT) for reliable policework. Simply put: Face recognition matches can no longer be the only evidence police use to justify an arrest. 

FRT creates an “imprint” from an image of a face, then compares that imprint to other images—often a law enforcement database made up of mugshots, driver’s license images, or even images scraped from the internet. The technology itself is fraught with issues, including that it is highly inaccurate for certain demographics, particularly Black men and women. The Detroit Police Department makes face recognition queries using DataWorks Plus software to the This article has been indexed from Deeplinks