A Farmington Hills man who says he was wrongfully arrested thru facial recognition technology is calling for a public apology from Detroit police. Robert Williams says the department should abandon its use of facial recognition technology.
The complaint by Williams, with the help of the ACLU, alleges that his Michigan driver license photo in a statewide image repository was incorrectly identified as a likely match in a shoplifting incident. The ACLU complaint says police scanned surveillance video footage of a 2018 theft inside a Shinola watch store in Detroit.
Williams was arrested in January in front of his wife and young daughters at their home in Farmington Hills.
The complaint says Detroit Police “relied on flawed and racist technology without taking reasonable measures to verify the information.” It says the officers involved were “rude and threatening” and that the department has resisted requests for information from it’s records.
The Wayne County prosecutor later dismissed the case, but could pursue it again.