‘Thousands of Dollars for Something I Didn’t Do’

Detective Bartholomew’s identification of Mr. Reid led to a second warrant for his arrest in East Baton Rouge Parish, where, according to a police report, the man he resembled had used a stolen credit card to buy a $2,800 Chanel bag at another consignment store.

The Baton Rouge Police Department “trusted the information” from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, a department spokesman, Sgt. L’Jean McKneely, said. “What methods they used, we do not know,” he added.

Law enforcement officers generally say they do not need to mention the use of facial recognition technology because it is only a lead in a case and not the sole reason for someone’s arrest, protecting it from exposure as if it were a confidential informant. But according to Clare Garvie, an expert on the police use of facial recognition, there are four other publicly known cases of wrongful arrests that appear to have involved little investigation beyond a face match, all involving Black men. She has come across a handful of other examples across the country, she said, in her work with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

For Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change, a racial justice advocacy group, the technology exacerbates the problems of what he called “racist policing.”

“If facial recognition was misclassifying white people, white men or white women, it would not be on the shelf,” he said. “Some of us and some of our communities are expendable.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/technology/facial-recognition-false-arrests.html