Man receives $300,000 settlement after being wrongly accused of robbery, cops change facial recognition technology

THE city ​​of Detroit The city will pay $300,000 to a man wrongly accused of shoplifting. As part of a settlement with the man, the city will change how its police force uses facial recognition technology to identify suspects,

Robert Williams' driver's license photo was wrongly reported as likely matching a man captured on grainy security video during a robbery at a Shinola watch store in 2018. Williams was arrested two years later outside his wife and two young daughters on their lawn in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills.

“We're extremely excited that in the future there will be more assurances about the use of this technology, in the hopes that we'll live in a better world because of it, even though we'd like them not to use it at all,” Williams said, according to the Associated Press.

Williams, a black man, was held in jail for more than 24 hours and defended himself in court before the charges were ultimately dropped, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which says facial recognition technology is flawed and racially biased, noting that there has been a higher rate of false matches for black people.

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The city of Detroit has agreed to pay Robert Williams $300,000 after he was wrongly accused of shoplifting using facial recognition technology. (Drew English/ACLU via AP)

Williams is one of three people, all black, who were wrongly arrested after Detroit police used facial recognition technology to try to identify a suspect, the ACLU said in a news release announcing the settlement.

Police Chief James White announced new measures regarding facial recognition technology in August, while the litigation was still ongoing. The move came after an eight-months pregnant woman said she was wrongly accused of carjacking.

White said at the time that there had to be other evidence beyond technology for police to believe a suspect had “the means, the ability and the opportunity to commit the crime.”

Under the agreement with Williams, Detroit police will not be allowed to stop people based solely on facial recognition results and will not be able to make arrests based on photos created from a facial recognition search, according to the ACLU.

“The Detroit police’s facial recognition abuses have completely upended my life,” Williams said in the ACLU’s press release. “My wife and young daughters watched helplessly as I was arrested for a crime I didn’t commit, and when I came home from jail, I had already missed my youngest daughter’s first tooth and my oldest couldn’t even stand to look at my photo. Even now, years later, it still makes them cry when they think about it.”

The police department will also conduct an audit of all cases from 2017 to 2023 that used facial recognition technology to obtain an arrest warrant. A prosecutor will be notified if police find that an arrest was made without independent evidence.

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Under the settlement, Detroit police will be prohibited from stopping people based solely on facial recognition results and will not be able to make arrests based on photo lineups created from a facial recognition search. (iStock)

“Police reliance on shoddy technology only creates shoddy investigations,” said Phil Mayor, senior attorney at the ACLU of Michigan. “Under this agreement, the Detroit Police Department should go from being the national leader in wrongful arrests based on facial recognition technology to a leader in implementing meaningful safeguards to constrain and limit its use of the technology.”

The mayor told The Associated Press that police can find a facial recognition trail and then do “old-fashioned police work” to see if there is reason to believe the identified person might have committed a crime.

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Williams was represented by the ACLU and the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative at the University of Michigan Law School.

“We hope that this groundbreaking settlement will not only prevent future wrongful arrests of black people in Detroit, but also serve as a model for other police departments that insist on using facial recognition technology,” said Michael J. Steinberg, director of the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative at the University of Michigan Law School.

“We are also pleased that Mr. Williams, who has become a face of the movement to end the misuse of facial recognition, will receive some relief.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.