Detroit Police to Change Facial Recognition Software Use After Pregnant Woman Wrongfully Charged with Robbery
The accuracy of facial recognition software is at the root of a third lawsuit against the Detroit Police Department, according to the Associated Press.
Porcha Woodruff, 32, was arrested in February while preparing to take her children to school. Eight months pregnant at the time, Woodruff was wrongfully identified by facial recognition software as a suspect in a robbery and carjacking the month prior.
The case was ultimately dismissed after a key witness didn't show up to court.
Detroit Police Chief James White said that while the technology produced some leads in the case, its use was followed by "poor police work."
“It’s particularly difficult when you’re talking about someone who was eight months pregnant, so we empathize with that,” White said. “We recognize we have to do better and there will be accountability on this mistake.”
“We want to ensure that nothing like this happens again.”
White said that the city will continue to use the technology, which helped police identify and arrest 16 murder suspects this year, but that Detroit Police officers will not be allowed “to use facial-recognition-derived images in a photographic lineup. Period.”
The policy change comes after Woodruff's lawsuit as well as urgings from the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan to Detroit Police to stop using the technology. According to BridgeMI, of six cases where people were falsely accused of a crime due to facial recognition technology, half are from Detroit and all are Black people.
“It’s deeply concerning that 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,” Phil Mayor, senior staff attorney at ACLU of Michigan, wrote in a statement.
“As Ms. Woodruff’s horrifying experience illustrates, the Department’s use of this technology must end. Furthermore, the DPD continues to hide its abuses of this technology, forcing people whose rights have been violated to expose its wrongdoing case by case. DPD should not be permitted to avoid transparency and hide its own misconduct from public view at the same time it continues to subject Detroiters to dragnet surveillance.”
