The city of Detroit agreed to pay $300,000 to a Black man who was wrongly arrested for shoplifting, and to change how police use facial-recognition technology to solve crimes after the software identified him as a suspect. Robert Williams' driver’s license photo was incorrectly flagged by facial-recognition software as a likely match to a man seen on security video at a Shinola watch store in 2018, the Associated Press reports. “We are extremely excited that going forward there will be more safeguards on the use of this technology with our hope being to live in a better world because of it,” Williams said, “even though what we would like for them to do is not use it at all.” The agreement was announced by the American Civil Liberties Union and the civil rights litigation initiative at University of Michigan Law School. Critics argue that the technology is flawed and racially biased.
Detroit police will be prohibited from arresting people based solely on facial-recognition results and won’t make arrests based on photo lineups generated from a facial-recognition search, the ACLU said. “They can get a facial-recognition lead and then they can go out and do old-fashioned police work and see if there’s actually any reason to believe that the person who was identified ... might have committed a crime,” said Phil Mayor, an ACLU attorney. The agreement with Williams says Detroit police will go back and look at cases from 2017 to 2023 in which facial recognition was used. A prosecutor will be notified if police learn that an arrest was made without independent evidence. “When someone is arrested and charged based on a facial-recognition scan and a lineup result, they often face significant pressure to plead guilty,” Mayor said. “That is all the more true if the individual – unlike Mr Williams – has a criminal record and thus faces longer sentences and more suspicious police and prosecutors.”