More than a Dozen Wrongful Arrests Due to Police Reliance on Facial Recognition Technology

By American Civil Liberties Union.

Summary: Documents a pattern of wrongful arrests across the US tied to police use of facial recognition technology.

Relevance: In the Surveillance & Civic Life subdomain, overlapping directly with policing and carceral systems: documents how facial recognition misidentification leads to wrongful arrest, relevant to social workers supporting clients caught up in the criminal legal system through a technology error rather than any conduct of their own.

Key findings: At least 14 people in the US have been wrongfully arrested off facial recognition matches since 2019, including Kimberlee Williams, who spent six months jailed after a false match sent Maryland police after her despite geotagged social media proving she was in Oklahoma at the time. ACLU notes “most of the known wrongful arrests from this technology have been of Black people,” consistent with research showing higher false-match rates for people of color, women, younger people, and the elderly.

Read the original: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/more-than-a-dozen-wrongful-arrests-due-to-police-reliance-on-facial-recognition-technology