These wrongfully arrested black men say a bill in California would allow police to abuse facial recognition

California lawmakers are considering banning police from using facial recognition technology as the sole reason for a search or arrest, a move critics say will not prevent wrongful arrests. (Rahul Lal, Sipa USA via Reuters)

BY KHARI JOHNSON | CalMatters

In 2019 and 2020, three black men were charged and incarcerated for crimes they did not commit after police misidentified them using facial recognition. Their wrongful arrest lawsuits are still pending, but their cases demonstrate how AI-powered tools can lead to civil rights violations and lasting consequences for the defendants’ families.

Now all three men are speaking out against a pending bill in California that would prohibit police from using facial recognition technology as the sole reason for a search or arrest, requiring corroborative evidence instead.

The problem, critics say, is that a possible “match” in facial recognition is not evidence – and that it can lead to misguided investigations, even when police are looking for corroborating evidence.

After a controversial hearing, the Senate Public Safety Committee today voted unanimously to forward House Bill 1814. The bill passed the Assembly unanimously last month.

Such a law “would not have stopped the police from falsely arresting me in front of my wife and daughters,” Robert Williams told CalMatters. In 2020, Detroit police charged Williams with stealing thousands of dollars worth of watches — the first known case of a false arrest using facial recognition in the United States — after facial recognition matched surveillance video to a photo of Williams in a government database. Investigators placed his photo in a “six-pack lineup” with five others, and he was singled out by a security guard who had seen a surveillance image but not the theft itself.

“In my case, as in others, the police did exactly what AB 1814 required them to do, but it didn’t help,” said Williams, who is black. “When the facial recognition software told them I was the suspect, it poisoned the investigation. This technology is racially biased and unreliable and should be banned.”

“I implore California lawmakers not to settle for half measures that do not truly protect people like me.”

However, the bill’s author, Democratic Representative Phil Ting of San Francisco, stressed that facial recognition technology should no longer be the sole criterion for a warrant, search or arrest. This could prevent unlawful arrests like those in Detroit.

And he emphasized that this would improve the status quo for Californians.

“The state’s law enforcement agencies do not currently need permission from anyone to do anything in the area of ​​facial recognition,” Ting said. “None of the state’s laws provide any guidance in this particular area.”

“This is actually a good first step to really provide some security, provide some protection of civil liberties and make sure that we take the first step towards regulating facial recognition technology.”

The first facial recognition searches in the United States occurred more than two decades ago, a process that begins with a photo of a suspect, usually taken from security camera footage. The facial recognition on your iPhone is trained to match your photo, but the facial recognition used by law enforcement searches databases of mugshots or driver’s license photos, which can contain millions of photos, and can fail in numerous ways. Tests by researchers have shown that the technology is less accurate when trying to identify people with dark skin, people of Asian or American descent, or people who identify as transgender, when an examination image of a suspect is of poor quality, or when the image in a database is out of date.

After a computer compiles a list of possible matches from an image database, police select a suspect from a pool of candidates and then show that photo to an eyewitness. Although people often think they’re good at this, eyewitness testimony is one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions in the United States.

Because prosecutors use facial recognition to identify potential suspects but ultimately rely on eyewitness accounts, the technology can play a role in criminal investigations but remains hidden from the accused and defense attorneys.

Instructions not to consider a possible match with a facial recognition system as the sole reason for an arrest sometimes make no difference. For example, it did not do so in the case of Alonzo Sawyer, a man who was wrongfully arrested near Baltimore and spent nine days in jail.

Njeer Parks, who spent nearly a year battling allegations that he stole items from a New Jersey hotel gift shop and then nearly hit a police officer with a stolen car, spoke out against the California bill in a video posted to Instagram last week, saying police “won’t do their job if the AI ​​already says, ‘It’s him.’ That’s what happened to me.”

“I was lucky,” he told CalMatters in a phone interview about a receipt that exonerated him and kept him out of jail. “I don’t want anyone to go to jail for something they didn’t do.”

At today’s hearing, the attorney for Michael Oliver, a third Black man falsely accused of attacking a Detroit high school teacher in 2020, testified. “The warrant application in Michael’s case was based solely on a supposed match (with facial recognition technology) and a photo lineup,” said attorney David Robinson. “Other than the photo lineup, the detective did not do any further investigation. So it’s easy to say it’s the officer’s fault for doing a poor job or not investigating. But he relied on (the facial recognition) and believed it must be right. That’s the automation bias that was referenced in these sessions.”

“Despite the warning to the officer – ‘investigative leads only’ – that advice was trumped by the hypnotic effect of this machine, which the officer saw as faster and more intelligent than himself, and that must be right.”

Supporters of Ting’s bill include the California Faculty Association and the League of California Cities. The California Police Chief Association argues that facial recognition can reduce crime and provide police with actionable leads. The technology is also important because California wants to host international events such as the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

“Across the country, real-world examples of law enforcement using (facial recognition technology) to solve serious crimes demonstrate how important this new technology can be in protecting our communities,” argued the California Police Chiefs Association, citing cases in which facial recognition played a role in identifying the culprits, including a shooting at newspaper headquarters in Maryland and a rape in New York.

Facial recognition alone should never lead to false arrests, Jake Parker of the Security Industry Association told members of the California Assembly a few weeks ago. That’s why AB 1814 is intended to support investigative approaches with evidence, not just a possible match in facial recognition.