NYPD Under Fire After Facial Recognition Match Wrongfully Landed A Black Father In Jail
Civil rights and privacy advocates are demanding an investigation into the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) use of facial recognition technology after it led to a Brooklyn father’s wrongful arrest, as first reported by The New York Times.
The Legal Aid Society is now calling for a formal investigation, accusing the NYPD of violating its own policies around the use of facial recognition. Human rights organizations are also renewing calls for a complete ban on the technology.
Brooklyn Father Wrongfully Arrested
Trevis Williams, 36, was arrested in April after NYPD facial recognition software flagged his photo as a possible match for an Amazon worker who exposed himself to a woman in Manhattan two months earlier.
Like Williams, the actual suspect was Black, had a thick beard and mustache, and wore his hair in braids. However, the suspect was about 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighed roughly 160 pounds. Williams is 6-foot-2 and 230 pounds. On the day of the incident, he was driving from Connecticut to Brooklyn, and location data from his phone placed him 12 miles away.
Despite this, a facial recognition program flagged his mugshot as a “possible match.” A week prior, Williams had been arrested in a separate case that was later dismissed, but his image remained in the NYPD’s database.
Police used the match to include his photo in a six-person lineup, all of whom were Black men with dreadlocks and facial hair. The woman picked Williams and signed her name under his photo. “Confident it is him,” a detective wrote in the case report.
Police did not reach out to Amazon to confirm the identity of the delivery worker.
Lasting Impacts
Williams spent over two days in custody. Though the charges were dropped, their consequences are still being felt.
The victim told the New York Times that she initially felt reassured by Williams’ arrest, but after learning the charges were dropped, that tranquillity vanished.
Meanwhile, Williams, a father to a 12-year-old, feared the charges could land him on the sex offender registry. “I despise people who do stuff like that,” he told The New York Times. “Sometimes, I just feel like I’m having panic attacks.”
He also told Eyewitness News that he was in the hiring process to become a correctional officer at Rikers Island. “But after my arrest, they kind of froze the hiring process.”
“I hope people don’t have to sit in jail or prison for things that they didn’t do,” he said.
NYPD under Fire
The NYPD has used facial recognition technology since 2011 and runs thousands of searches each year, but it does not track how often those searches result in errors. While police departments in Indiana and Detroit require additional evidence, such as fingerprints or cellphone data, before using facial recognition matches, the NYPD has no such policy.
A spokesman stated that the department never relied solely on it to make an arrest, and that the victim’s identification of Mr. Williams provided the evidence to charge him. Karen Newirth, an attorney who specializes in eyewitness ID cases, told The New York Times that combining facial recognition with traditional eyewitness testimony only “compounds the problem.”
The Legal Aid Society, the public defenders group that represented Williams, also alleges that the NYPD is using unauthorized photo databases and relying on other city agencies, such as the fire department, to circumvent its own restrictions.
In a letter to the New York City Department of Investigation, the organization said, “We are gravely concerned that the cases we have identified are only the tip of the iceberg.”
Facial Recognition Errors Disproportionately Harm Black Communities
At least 10 wrongful arrests nationwide have been linked to facial recognition errors, most involving Black men. Legal Aid says it has documented seven such cases in New York alone over the past five years.
POCIT previously reported that Porcha Woodruff was eight months pregnant when she was arrested after facial recognition technology wrongly identified her as a suspect in a robbery and carjacking. Robert Williams was wrongly arrested in front of his wife and two children for allegedly stealing watches from a Detroit store. Randal Reid was driving to his mother’s home for Thanksgiving celebrations when local police pulled him over and arrested him for a crime in a state he had never set foot in.
Human rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International, have also called for a ban on the use of facial recognition by the police. They argue the technology disproportionately harms over-policed communities and misidentifies people with darker skin at much higher rates.
In Williams’ case, his lawyer Diane Akerman said the police could have avoided the arrest with basic investigative work. “Traditional police work could have solved this case or at least saved Mr. Williams from going through this,” she said.
CBS News reports that Williams is now considering legal action.
Image credit: Natalie Keyssar for The New York Times
