Facialized: Falsely Arrested by Facial Recognition

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Tue Jul 13 17:08:32 PDT 2021


https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgx5gd/man-wrongfully-arrested-by-facial-recognition-tells-congress-his-story
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVr7uoEvhsk
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/4084

The Government will not restore him to his former state by
formally apologizing, and deleting his Mugshot, Fingerprints,
DNA, police and prosecution records, paying compensation
for losses, etc.

Michigan resident Robert Williams testified about being wrongfully
arrested by Detroit Police in an effort to urge Congress to pass
legislation against the use of facial recognition technology.
Williams' testimony was part of a hearing held by the House of
Representatives' subcommittee on crime, terrorism, and homeland
security, which dealt with how law enforcement uses the highly
controversial surveillance technology. Congress recently introduced
the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium, which
would indefinitely ban its use by law enforcement. Williams was
wrongfully arrested in 2020 for federal larceny after he was
misidentified by the Detroit Police Department's facial recognition
software after they used a grainy image from the surveillance footage.
He was then picked from a photo lineup by the store security guard who
wasn't actually present for the incident. According to his testimony,
Williams was detained for thirty hours and was not given any food or
water. [...]

Research has repeatedly shown that facial recognition technology is
fundamentally biased against women and people of color, leading to
errors like this. Even when working properly, privacy advocates have
argued facial recognition systems disproportionately target
communities of color, creating further pretext for police
intervention. [...] "Large scale adoption of this technology would
inject further inequity into a system at a time when we should be
moving to make the criminal justice system more equitable,"
Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (TX-18) said during the hearing. The
subcommittee also referenced a recent study from the U.S. Government
Accountability Office that reported that 20 federal agencies used
facial recognition software last year. Six federal agencies, including
the FBI and the U.S. Postal Service, reported using it during the 2020
Black Lives Matter protests that followed the police murder of George
Floyd.

Robert Williams is just one of many people impacted by this
technology's errors and biases. Williams is now represented by the
ACLU and is suing the Detroit Police Department for damages and policy
changes to prohibit the use of facial recognition technology. So far,
the technology has been banned statewide in Vermont and Virginia, as
well as in 20 cities across the US. "Mr. Williams deserved better from
the law enforcement agencies entrusted to use a technology that we all
know is less accurate when applied to citizens who look like him,"
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) said in his
testimony.


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