(CBS DETROIT) – The city of Detroit has agreed to a settlement in a lawsuit filed by a Black man who was wrongfully arrested for shoplifting and will change how the police department utilizes facial recognition technology.
Robert Williams was wrongfully arrested by Detroit police at his Farmington Hills home in 2020 after he was accused of stealing watches from the Shinola store in Detroit’s Midtown neighborhood in 2018.
Williams’ driver’s license photo was flagged as a likely match to the suspect in the security video from the theft. His photo, and five others, were then presented to a loss-prevention worker, who identified Williams as the suspect, according to a police report.
This led to his arrest in front of his wife and two children.
“The Detroit Police Department’s abuses of facial recognition technology completely upended my life,” said Williams in a release from the American Civil Liberties Union. “My wife and young daughters had to watch helplessly as I was arrested for a crime I didn’t commit and by the time I got home from jail, I had already missed my youngest losing her first tooth and my eldest couldn’t even bear to look at my picture. Even now, years later, it still brings them to tears when they think about it.”
As part of the settlement, the Detroit Police Department will make changes to how it uses facial recognition technology. Under the agreement, Detroit police cannot arrest people solely on results from facial recognition technology and can’t make arrests using a lineup of photos from a facial recognition search, according to the ACLU.
In addition, there will be police training on the technology that includes information on its risks.
All cases since 2017 where facial recognition technology was used to get an arrest warrant will also be investigated per the terms of the settlement.
Last year, Detroit Police Chief James White said that he was setting new policies for using facial recognition technology. This move came after Porcha Woodruff, a woman who was eight months pregnant, said she had wrongfully been arrested in a robbery and carjacking case.
White called the police work in this case “very poor” and had said there must be evidence outside of facial recognition technology for police to believe that a suspect could have had the “means, ability and opportunity to commit the crime.”
In response to White’s comments on the use of the technology in her case, Woodruff said, “Mistakes cost, I will say that. It did in this case. I went to jail for what.”