Detroit woman sues city after being falsely arrested while pregnant due to facial recognition technology::A Detroit woman is suing the city and a police detective after she was falsely arrested because of facial recognition technology while she was eight months pregnant, according to court documents.
I’m going to buck the trend here and say this is less about the facial recognition software. The police used an 8 year old photo even though they had something more recent available. Then the victim identifies the woman. The only thing the software did was put her in the lineup.
I’m very much against facial recognition, even if it’s 100% accurate. It’s because it will get abused. Just like any other tech that reduces privacy.
Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable at picking people out of a lineup as well. But I can kind of understand how if two unreliable systems point to the same person, that could be seen as enough for an arrest. It shouldn’t have taken nearly as long for her to be cleared of any charges, however.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A Detroit woman is suing the city and a police detective after she was falsely arrested because of facial recognition technology while she was eight months pregnant, according to court documents.
Porcha Woodruff, 32, was getting her two children ready for school on the morning of Feb. 16 when six police officers showed up at her doorstep and presented her with an arrest warrant alleging robbery and carjacking.
“Ms. Woodruff later discovered that she was implicated as a suspect through a photo lineup shown to the victim of the robbery and carjacking, following an unreliable facial recognition match,” court documents say.
When Oliver learned that a woman had returned the victim’s phone to the gas station, she ran facial technology on the video, which identified her as Woodruff, the lawsuit alleges.
On the day Woodruff was arrested, she and her fiancé urged officers to check the warrant to confirm whether the woman who committed the crime was pregnant, which they refused to do, the lawsuit alleges.
The office confirmed that facial recognition prompted police to include the plaintiff’s photo in a six-pack, or array of images of potential suspects in the warrant package.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
And all the facial recognition has failed on black people… Is this a Family Guy episode?
Fuck yes. Go set some precedent.
Facial recognition by law enforcement should be banned.
Well it does have its place. DoD and DHS has a human verify after the system certified the match. After the human “touch”, is when mistakes like this do not occur. What needs to happen is follow what DoD and CBP have created to verify so called matches to reduce the impact against blacks.
Source: I’m the former Identity Operations Manager for a major agency.
