By Perla Chavez
DETROIT, MI – ACLU, in a statement last week, chronicled that as a result of Robert William’s wrongful arrest based on faulty facial recognition technology in 2020, the Detroit Police Department established the nation’s strongest policies to constrain law enforcement use of controversial tech.
The ACLU explains the settlement agreement benefits people of color and women, because they are more likely to be misidentified by facial recognition technology.
Of the three cases of wrongful arrests where Detroit police have relied on facial recognition technology, the individuals wrongfully arrested were Black, reports the ACLU.
Williams, a Black man, was wrongfully arrested for allegedly stealing watches from a Detroit store at his home in Farmington Hills, in front of his wife and two children.
The ACLU noted in its detailed summary, that police are prohibited from arresting individuals purely based on facial recognition results or photo lineup results following a facial recognition search and also from conducting a lineup purely from facial recognition leads without evidence linking the suspect to the crime; police must be trained on the risks and dangers of facial recognition technology, and an audit will be conducted of the cases since 2017 where facial recognition technology helped to obtain an arrest warrant.
The ACLU insists the agreement will be enforced for four years since the court will retain jurisdiction. According to the terms of the settlement, Detroit will be paying monetary damages to Williams and attorneys’ fees.
Williams stated, “The Detroit Police Department’s abuses of facial recognition technology completely upended my life…My wife and young daughters had to watch helplessly as I was arrested for a crime I didn’t commit and by the time I got home from jail, I had already missed my youngest losing her first tooth and my eldest couldn’t even bear to look at my picture.
“Even now, years later, it still brings them to tears when they think about it. The scariest part is that what happened to me could have happened to anyone,” Williams continued.
Williams concludes, “But, at least with this settlement, it will be far less likely to happen again to another person in Detroit. With this painful chapter of our lives closing, my wife and I will continue raising awareness about the dangers of this technology.”
Phil Mayor, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Michigan said, “This settlement finally brings justice to Detroit, and the Williams family, after years of fighting to expose the flaws of this dangerous technology.”
“Police reliance on shoddy technology merely creates shoddy investigations. Under this settlement, the Detroit Police Department should transform from being a nationwide leader in wrongful arrests driven by facial recognition technology into being a leader in implementing meaningful guardrails to constrain and limit their use of the technology,” Mayor added.
Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project said, “The multiple wrongful arrests by police in Detroit and other American cities show that face recognition technology is fundamentally dangerous in the hands of law enforcement.”
“The most effective way to avoid abuses is for lawmakers to ban police use of the technology, as city councils from Boston to Minneapolis to San Francisco have done. But in jurisdictions where lawmakers have yet to act, police departments should look to Detroit’s new policies, which will seriously mitigate the risk of further false arrests and related harms,” added Wessler.
Michael J. Steinberg, director of the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative at the University of Michigan Law School, commented, “We hope this groundbreaking settlement will not only prevent future wrongful arrests of Black people in Detroit, but that it will serve as a model for other police departments that insist on using facial recognition technology.
“We are also thrilled that Mr. Williams, who has become a face of the movement to stop the misuse of facial recognition, will receive some measure of relief,” added Steinberg. 
