Detroit Police Department – Worst Offender in the Misuse of Facial Recognition Technology – Now a Leader Setting National Standards

​We’ve long recounted the bad news on law enforcement’s use of facial recognition software – how it misidentifies people and labels them as criminals, particularly people of color. But there is good news on this subject for once: the Detroit Police Department has reached a settlement with a man falsely arrested on the basis of a bad match from facial recognition technology (FRT) that includes what many civil libertarians are hailing as a new national standard for police.
 
The list of injustices from false positives from FRT has grown in recent years. We told the story of Randall Reid, a Black man in Georgia, arrested for the theft of luxury goods in Louisiana. Even though Reid had never been to Louisiana, he was held in jail for a week. We told the story of Porchia Woodruff, a Detroit woman eight months pregnant, who was arrested in her driveway while her children cried. Her purported crime was – get this – a recent carjacking. Woodruff had to be rushed to the hospital after suffering contractions in her holding cell.
 
Detroit had a particularly bad run of such misuses of facial recognition in criminal investigations. One of them was the arrest of Robert Williams in 2020 for the 2018 theft of five watches from a boutique store in which the thief was caught on a surveillance camera. Williams spent 30 hours in jail.
 
Backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Michigan, and the University of Michigan Civil Rights Litigation Initiative, Williams sued the police for wrongful arrest. In an agreement blessed by a federal court in Michigan, Williams received a generous settlement from the Detroit police. What is most important about this settlement agreement are the new rules Detroit has embraced. From now on:
 

• Police will not be able to conduct a lineup based solely on an FRT investigative lead without further independent and reliable evidence linking a suspect to a crime. Before seeking an arrest warrant, a detective must document evidence establishing probable cause from sources other than this technology.

 

• When requesting and conducting an FRT search, investigators and analysts must complete detailed forms that document critical information about that search – including the quality of the original photo and how many other potential photos of the suspect are in the database that did not show up as a lead.

 

• Prosecutors must make any use of FRT in an investigation available to defense counsel in discovery as potentially exculpatory information. FRT in investigations will also be limited to violent crimes.

 
Another series of reforms impose discipline on the way in which lineups of suspects or their images unfold. When witnesses perform lineup identifications, they may not be told that FRT was used as an investigative lead. Witnesses must report how confident they are about any identification. Officers showing images to a witness must themselves not know who the real suspect is, so they don’t mislead the witness with subtle, non-verbal clues. And photos of suspects must be shown one at a time, instead of showing all the photos at once – potentially leading a witness to select the one image that merely has the closest resemblance to the suspect.
 
Perhaps most importantly, Detroit police officers will be trained on the proper uses of facial recognition and eyewitness identification.
 
“The pipeline of ‘get a picture, slap it in a lineup’ will end,” Phil Mayor, a lawyer for the ACLU of Michigan told The New York Times. “This settlement moves the Detroit Police Department from being the best-documented misuser of facial recognition technology into a national leader in having guardrails in its use.”
 
PPSA applauds the Detroit Police Department and ACLU for crafting standards that deserve to be adopted by police departments across the United States.