Ybor City's face recognition cameras claim their first innocent v ictim.

[Trei, Peter]

http://www.sptimes.com/News/080801/TampaBay/_They_made_me_feel_li.shtml

[In fairness, the false identification was not made by the 
Face-It system, but by a human. The cited page includes
the photo in question - which is a heck of a lot more close
up then I expected - pt]

'They made me feel like a criminal'

  He was just having lunch in Ybor City when a surveillance
camera captured his image. Weeks later, the police show up.

By AMY HERDY

St. Petersburg Times, published August 8, 2001

   He was just having lunch in Ybor City when a surveillance
camera captured his image. Weeks later, the police show up.

TAMPA -- Rob Milliron has never married. He has never had
kids, never been to Oklahoma.

   Yet three Tampa police officers went to Milliron's
construction job site Monday and asked him whether he was
wanted in Oklahoma for child neglect.
   It seems that his face wound up on a surveillance camera
in Ybor City. News cameras captured that image. A woman in
Tulsa saw his picture in U.S. News and World Report and
called Tampa police.
   She said the man in the photo was her ex-husband and was
wanted on felony child neglect charges.
   Turns out they had the wrong man. But the experience has
turned Milliron into a vocal critic of the controversial
surveillance system.
   "From that picture, I was identified as a wanted person,"
said Milliron, 32, whose only previous brush with the law
involved a marijuana possession charge when he was 19.
   The surveillance system uses software called Face-It and
is linked to 36 cameras throughout the Centro Ybor
entertainment complex and along E Seventh Avenue. Images
taken from the cameras are compared with a data base that
includes wanted felons and sexual offenders.
   If the image is a match, officers are dispatched to
question the person. But in this case it wasn't the system
that flagged Milliron, but simply a woman who saw his
picture with a news story.
   The plainclothes detective, accompanied by two uniformed
officers, had a copy of the magazine, folded open to the
page with Milliron's photo.
   After producing identification, answering the detective's
questions and enduring curious stares and inquiries from his
construction co-workers, a mortified Milliron went home.
   "He was absolutely horrified," said Cheryl Toole, 32,
Milliron's girlfriend of nine years.
   "He said, "I was surrounded by the police today,' " Toole
recalled. "We were worried they'd come to our home in the
middle of the night."
   Equally upsetting, Milliron said, was the fact that
beneath his photo in the magazine, a headline read, "You
Can't Hide Those Lying Eyes in Tampa."
   "It made me out to be a criminal," he said.
   Tampa police Detective Bill Todd, who took the call from
the Tulsa woman and interviewed Milliron, said Milliron did
not seem upset.
   "He was laughing about it," said Todd, who spearheaded
the software project that captured Milliron's image.
   Milliron's photograph was captured in June while he was
on a lunch break in Ybor City.
   He didn't know it at the time, but the Police Department
used his photo to demonstrate the system to local news
media.
   The software costs $30,000, but is on loan for a year by
its owner, Visionics Corp. of New Jersey, while the
department decides whether to purchase it.
   Milliron's photo ran in the St. Petersburg Times June
30. A caption under the photo read, "The man in this image
was not identified as wanted."
   The Times later sold the photo to U.S. News and World
Report.
   The software system has sparked controversy
nationwide. Protesters say the "spy cameras" intrude on
citizens' privacy. Mayor Dick Greco, however, has said the
system is no more intrusive than the cameras found in banks
and shopping malls.
   Milliron, who says he plans to retain an attorney, hopes
the software system will be removed.
   "I don't think it's right," he said. "They made me feel
like a criminal."
   - Times researcher John Martin contributed to this
report. Amy Herdy can be reached at (813) 226-3386 or
herdy at sptimes.com.