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Detroit Woman Sues City After Being Falsely Arrested Due To Facial Recognition (nbcnews.com) 220

Posted by BeauHD from the what-a-nightmare dept.
Long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker shares a report from NBC News: 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. Woodruff initially believed the officers were joking given her visibly pregnant state. She was arrested. "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. [...]

Woodruff was charged with robbery and carjacking and released from the Detroit Detention Center at around 7 p.m. on $100,000 personal bond. Her fiance took her to a medical center, where she was diagnosed with a low heart rate due to dehydration and was told she was having contractions from stress related to the incident. On March 6, the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office dropped the case for "insufficient evidence," according to the lawsuit. In a statement Sunday, the prosecutor's office said the case was dismissed, which emphasizes that a judge made the final decision, not prosecutors. The prosecutor's office said the warrant that led to Woodruff's arrest was on solid ground. "The warrant was appropriate based upon the facts," it said.

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. Detroit Police Chief James E. White said he reviewed the allegations in the lawsuit, which he said are "very concerning." "We are taking this matter very seriously, but we cannot comment further at this time due to the need for additional investigation," he said in a statement. "We will provide further information once additional facts are obtained and we have a better understanding of the circumstances."
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Detroit Woman Sues City After Being Falsely Arrested Due To Facial Recognition More

Detroit Woman Sues City After Being Falsely Arrested Due To Facial Recognition

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  • I hope she gets a boat-load of money from them. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Biljrat ( 45007 ) on Monday August 07, 2023 @05:45PM (#63748606) Homepage

    It will not stop the stupidity but maybe it can slow it down a bit.

    • Re:I hope she gets a boat-load of money from them. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by HBI ( 10338492 ) on Monday August 07, 2023 @05:46PM (#63748614)

      Won't change a thing, but a payday would be nice for her.

    • Re:I hope she gets a boat-load of money from them. (Score:5, Informative)

      by quenda ( 644621 ) on Monday August 07, 2023 @07:25PM (#63748858)

      What the misleading headline does not say, is that the "facial recognition" was by the victim.
      Yes the police screwed up, but she was not arrested on the basis on computer recognition, as TFS implies.
      Another news site has a more honest, less click-baity headline:
      "US Mom Blames Face Recognition Technology for Flawed Arrest".
      She is understandably outraged at being not just arrested, but charged, without proper process, and looking for a payout.

    • Re:I hope she gets a boat-load of money from them. (Score:5, Informative)

      by quenda ( 644621 ) on Monday August 07, 2023 @07:37PM (#63748912)

      P.S. All the AI did was match some low-quality security-camera footage to a database of known criminals. She was one of multiple possible faces that came up. This is just one tool for police, and nobody expects this to be accurate.
      The problem was that the victim then identified the woman from mug-shots. Police should know the problem with this - the victim was only shown those mugshots because they resembled the robber. Instead of politely interviewing the woman, they arrested and charged her. Regardless of her past record, this is wrong. I'm thinking Detroit is not as fussy as they'd like to be in recruiting police. Who would want that job!?

          If the woman can show the police did not follow the required procedure, she has a chance of winning. If the police were within procedure, then that needs to be changed. AI is not the problem, just another tool. Detroit needs all the tools it can get.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by narcc ( 412956 )

        nobody expects this to be accurate.

        Correction: Nobody with a clue expects this to be accurate.

        Cops on the other hand...

        Okay, I'll admit that I'm not being entirely fair here. It's entirely possible that the police are fully aware and just don't care.

        The fact that they elected to use an 8-year-old photo when the had access to a much more recent photo makes this seem like they care, just not about justice.

    • Court settlements don't deter a damn thing. What they do is monetize the abuse so that it can continue even more efficiently for the perpetrators.

  • This is what happens when people stop thinking (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lsllll ( 830002 ) on Monday August 07, 2023 @05:57PM (#63748638)
    The Police officers arresting her didn't think to contact the detective on the case (if he wasn't one of the six) and put two and two together that if there was no mention that the robber and carjacker was pregnant, but the woman they're arresting is visibly pregnant (8 months), that something is awry and they need to consider there was a mistake. The least they could have done is stay until they cleared the matter instead of arresting her and dragging her into the station, and then forcing her to post 10% of her bond. I do hope she and her fetus are okay and that she gets properly compensated for this asinine mistake.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kellin ( 28417 )

      Judge Dredd. Cops think all civilians are guilty of something.

    • The victim picked her out of a lineup, the officers sent to arrest her aren't there to determine her guilt or innocence. The arresting officers likely knew nothing more than what was on the arrest warrant.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lsllll ( 830002 )
        I can't tell if what you wrote is in support of the title "This is what happens when people stop thinking", or if you're making an excuse for the officers not stopping to think that something may be wrong and relaying the newfound information about the pregnant woman to the detective before proceeding with the arrest. Let me put it another way. If the officers were going to arrest a man named Larry Laffer who was supposed to be in his 20s and get there and see a 50 year old man, they wouldn't proceed with

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by 3247 ( 161794 )

          Let me put it another way. If the officers were going to arrest a man named Larry Laffer who was supposed to be in his 20s and get there and see a 50 year old man, they wouldn't proceed with the arrest without double checking with the detective that got the warrant, would they?

          Do the police get an arrest warrant for "Larry Laffer, supposed to be in his 20s" or just for "Larry Laffer"?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ogive17 ( 691899 )
        Maybe they should start having some of the mug shots be older photos of police officers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by XXongo ( 3986865 )

      The Police officers arresting her didn't think to contact the detective on the case (if he wasn't one of the six)

      According to the article, the detective on the case was in fact the one who ran the facial identification. However, she did not ask the victim whether the woman who'd set him up for the carjacking was pregnant.

      and put two and two together that if there was no mention that the robber and carjacker was pregnant, but the woman they're arresting is visibly pregnant (8 months), that something is awry and they need to consider there was a mistake. The least they could have done is stay until they cleared the matter instead of arresting her and dragging her into the station, and then forcing her to post 10% of her bond. I do hope she and her fetus are okay and that she gets properly compensated for this asinine mistake.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lsllll ( 830002 )
        So wouldn't it have made sense to call the victim and ask if the perpetrator was visibly pregnant or not before arresting an 8-month pregnant woman?
        • how were they to know she was pregnant before the arrest warrant was drawn up and given to officers to execute? generally in these cases you don't alert the perp they have been identified before hand as they will flee or execute other high risk acts. This is a stuff up but there was no practical way to know before the arrest, however it should never have gotten to charges and the need for bail.

    • It was shoddy policework all around. Yes you can technically make an initial arrest from a police lineup, but why are you doing something like that when you're handing the prosecutor a doomed case from the start? There needs to be sufficient evidence to convict, even if the DA decides to railroad someone into a plea deal. No DA actually wants a weaker pool of evidence.

      If you're going to pick someone up and actually arrest them instead of just taking them in for questioning, you want to get more on them th

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      This happens a lot in the UK too. Computer says someone is guilty and the cops don't bother doing even the most basic checks. Not just facial recognition, stuff like typos on warrants lead to the wrong address, cloned car number plates, even just the officer misreading the sheet.

  • Bullshit. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by msauve ( 701917 ) on Monday August 07, 2023 @06:02PM (#63748652)
    "The warrant was appropriate based upon the facts," it said.

    No, simply looking like someone else, especially to an untrained observer, is not enough to support an arrest.

    • Re:Bullshit. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Required Snark ( 1702878 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2023 @03:20AM (#63749602)
      Typical police incompetence.

      A California woman spent 13 days in jail after being mistaken for another person with the same name, according to a lawsuit against the City of LA [cnn.com]. One example of a screwup that happens all over the country on a regular basis.

      Texas police held a Black family at gunpoint and handcuffed their son after an officer mistyped while running their license plate [yahoo.com]. He entered the wrong state code. The car was from Arkansas, AK, and the cop entered AZ for Arizona. The cop obviously didn't look at anything besides the APB on the wrong car.

      Wichita Kansas Death by Swatting, 2017 [wikipedia.org]. The cop who killed the innocent 28 year old man was later promoted to detective. He was never charged with any crime.

    • well it was slightly more than that, she looked like the person AND was identified by the victim in a lineup. Still the police and prosecutors should have used a bit of common sense.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by msauve ( 701917 )
        >was identified by the victim in a lineup.

        That's misleading. She was identified in a photo lineup including an 8 year old picture of her. Her picture was included only because of a facial recognition match, there was no probable cause she had been involved in the crime. If there had actually been a physical lineup, it would have happened after an arrest, probable cause would have already existed, and her pregnancy would have been distinguishing. There was no mention in the police report that the perp w

  • Not really the facial recognition (Score:4, Informative)

    by test321 ( 8891681 ) on Monday August 07, 2023 @06:12PM (#63748680)

    He was not arrested due to facial recognition. She was arrested after being recognized (mistakenly) by a witness. There is no issue with the face recognition here, she is just unfortunately a lookalike to the real criminal and both the computer and the humans found her matching. Maybe the police was overconfident in the recognition (computer then human) and did not do the entire homework before requesting the arrest; or the judge was lenient; or she was just unlucky to ALSO have walked with her mobile phone in the same area as the real criminal at the time the crime was committed.

    Since the case was dismissed; she lost two weeks of salary; she was exposed to emotional stress while incarcerated, she deserves a compensation as customary in these cases.

    • Human witnesses are even less reliable than computers at facial recognition.

      There are many examples of witnesses picking someone out of a lineup or photo sheet that looks nothing like the actual perp.

    • Re:Not really the facial recognition (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Moof123 ( 1292134 ) on Monday August 07, 2023 @06:35PM (#63748724)

      This is the danger of "good enough" tools. Tools with say a 95% correct identification rate will just turn off the brain of whoever is using them and just assume the tool is right by default. Meanwhile 1/20 suspects dragged in get their lives put in peril or destroyed. With qualified immunity there is little recourse to hold sloppy or criminal police work to account.

      In this case they used a 2015 photo from a prior suspended license arrest that was of very poor quality, and didn't bother to check her much higher quality DMV photo. Worse, the reference was to match against a convenience store security camera, which is often poor quality. In the end I think it was tantamount to technology obfuscated racial profiling.

      • > This is the danger of "good enough" tools

        Like human recognition? I don't see us getting rid of "yeah, that's the person that robbed me" any time soon.

    • Re:Not really the facial recognition (Score:5, Insightful)

      by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Monday August 07, 2023 @06:43PM (#63748740) Journal

      You appear to be attempting to minimize the role of the facial recognition software in this case, but what you are overlooking is the fact that the only reason she was in the photo lineup was the facial recognition software identified her as a possible match.

      I suggest that everyone clicks through to the article, because the picture makes the whole situation more understandable.

      Further reading:
      https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]

      There is still the issue of the carjacking victim "recognizing" her in the photo lineup, but the decks were stacked by the police by using an old photo of the woman.

      I expect to get modded down because some people with mod points won't like to acknowledge the realities in this case!

      • You appear to be attempting to minimize the role of the facial recognition software in this case, but what you are overlooking is the fact that the only reason she was in the photo lineup was the facial recognition software identified her as a possible match.

        The police regularly obtains a list of suspects based on loose indications and lookup into computer database: "suspect was driving a car of a particular color and model" and the computer lists a few dozen of car owners for those models. The police then eliminate matches one by one. Here they got the match by asking the computer not which car is similar to the criminal, but which face is similar. This is fine to me, as long as they do the job of eliminating the suspects based on other facts. Here there are g

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ugen ( 93902 )

      Ah, but it is. You see, the person was identified using the facial recognition *first*, and only then shown to a witness.
      If the detectives had to use some other method to come up with their suspect (rather than running facial recognition on a set of photos), they'd probably have to examine the circumstances at least a bit, and may be apply reason to their suspect selection. That would, hopefully, preclude them from picking a woman in the late stages of her pregnancy. OTOH, using facial recognition is a lazy

  • Stupid developers who train AI (Score:3)

    by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Monday August 07, 2023 @06:53PM (#63748758)
    Do they not understand that people's physical appearances can change? Like going through something like pregnancy.

  • The better understanding is this: the cops in north america are, broadly speaking, bad at their jobs and don't like doing police work. Every time they find some piece of tech that might make it 'easier' for them to do their jobs poorly, they're all over it. The important thing to note is that they don't care about accuracy as much as putting someone--anyone!--in prison, so whether a tool is accurate or not is irrelevant to them.

    This keeps happening over and over again. And yet police budgets continue to cli

  • it used to be they'd pull a lineup of suspects and in MOST cases there would only be one or MAYBE two that the witness would recognize. The problem here now is they're using computers to sweep thousands (or tens of thousands) of faces from things like a police artist sketch, and now the witness doesn't jsut get one or two close matches, they may get DOZENS of close matches, and in them they may get several nearly exact matches, well within the precision of the witness to identify.

    Basically, when the size o

  • I'm just going out on a limb, but my guess is that our article writer left out a key piece of information that she had priors and as a result was already in the system to be included in the lineup to begin with. Hopefully the arresting officers used their brains and treated her with respect when they realized she was (I assume) obviously pregnant. IMO the moral of the story is that you don't want to break the law and get in the system. Cause obviously you'll be at higher risk for these kinds of problems (AI

    • Re:Previous arrests? (Score:4, Informative)

      by narcc ( 412956 ) on Monday August 07, 2023 @11:19PM (#63749298) Journal

      she had priors

      Oh, please. She was arrested once in her early 20's for driving on a suspended license. We don't know the circumstances, but I'm willing to bet that it's something like "she couldn't pay a bullshit ticket for 'driving while black' and still needed to get to work".

      Hopefully the arresting officers used their brains and treated her with respect when they realized she was (I assume) obviously pregnant.

      They did not.

      Detroit Police Chief James E. White said he reviewed the allegations in the lawsuit, which he said are "very concerning."

      They knew she was innocent the instant they saw her and decided to harass her anyway. (They refused to check the warrant when asked, as it happens.) There is no justification for the actions of the police here. None.

      • Why would they need to check the warrant? The warrant was for her, not somebody else. But we all agree they did not do good policework as the never even talked to her before putting out the warrant.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by narcc ( 412956 )

          Why would they need to check the warrant?

          You're right. As their goal was clearly to harass a pregnant black woman, the warrant was completely irrelevant. Who cares if they have the right person as long as they're the right color?

  • If I cast a wide enough net I'm almost guaranteed to find someone who looks nearly exactly the same as a person in a photo. Everyone has a doubleganger somewhere in the world. Same with DNA tests that search for a set of markers. If you test for 20 markers that don't have even distributions you will expect to find multiple collisions in a set of 1000 people. The facial recognition cast a huge net of likely everyone in the state so matches that would be good enough for even the most observant eye witnes

  • I guess a photo lineup is what's strange here.

    Generally in the movies the photos are used to identifiy ex-convicts or people with criminal records. By using facial recognition to add people to the "line up" one could argue that, yes, people that look similar could be added and that could add chances to a misidentification.

    But the clear culprit here is not facial recognition, which is merely a tool to find possible matches (rather than perfect matches), but rather a failure of doing good police work. They co

  • This kind of crap is going to fill prisons with legitimately innocent people. Not just people who got a raw deal in court, which is bad enough, but people who aren't involved in any sort of crime who got picked for the jackpot by a piece of code.

  • The headline is a pure clickbait headline as she was not falsely arrested due to facial recognition. The system selected her photo as part of a set of people for a photo lineup, in the end it was the victim who choose her picture out of a lineup, so a human actually (falsely?) identified her as her attacker. The fact her photo was already in the system makes her not such an innocent person, the fact she was pregnant also doesn't exclude her from being part of a carjacking or sexual meeting. But mistakes wer

  • That dehydration bit might be a bigger problem (Score:3)

    by LostOne ( 51301 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2023 @11:08AM (#63750616) Homepage

    That the woman was diagnosed with dehydration after she was released might be a bigger headache for the police than the arrest itself. They have a duty of care once they take someone into custody and that diagnosis would seem to suggest they did not take that duty seriously.

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