Via Wikimedia Commons
Public Domain
By Ximena Cesa
DETROIT, MI – The American Civil Liberties Union this week filed a lawsuit against the Detroit Police Department for wrongfully arresting yet another person as a result of its faulty facial recognition technology.
According to the Michigan branch of the ACLU, the victim was allegedly falsely accused after the police attempted to match “an unknown suspect’s face to a photo in a database.”
This victim is the first of six who reported the false accusations from the ID system. All six who were falsely accused are Black. Of the six who were falsely accused, three were arrested.
The University of Michigan Law School’s Civil Rights Litigation Initiative and the ACLU of Michigan are combining forces to represent one of the three individuals arrested.
Their lawsuit asserts the department was guilty of “wrongfully arresting and jailing” their client in January 2020 “based on faulty facial recognition technology.”
The ACLU added that “this is the third known allegation of a wrongful arrest by the Detroit Police Department based on reliance on a false facial recognition match in three years.”
Phil Mayor, senior staff attorney for ACLU of Michigan, argues the Detroit Police Department “knows the devastating consequences of using flawed facial recognition technology as the basis for someone’s arrest and continues to rely on it anyway,”
Mayor urged Detroit to stop using the facial recognition technology, especially when used solely to arrest individuals.
ACLU of Michigan adds these arrests and accusations are just another example of how the Detroit Police Department hides its abuses and “continues to subject Detroiters to dragnet surveillance.”
