A man suing Florida police alleges that cops relied on a faulty facial recognition match and concealed exculpatory evidence when they arrested him on a charge of attempting to lure a child in August 2024. The plaintiff, Robert Dillon, was arrested after a facial recognition system flagged him as a 93 percent match to a suspect filmed by a McDonald’s surveillance camera.
“This case is about what happens when police let an error-prone artificial intelligence system stand in for an investigation,” said the lawsuit filed today. “A facial recognition algorithm flagged Robert Dillon as the man who tried to lure or entice a child under twelve years old at a Jacksonville Beach McDonald’s. It was wrong. Mr. Dillon, a fifty-two-year-old resident of Fort Myers, had never set foot in Jacksonville Beach. But rather than test the machine’s answer against the evidence that would have cleared him, the officers built a case to confirm it. Mr. Dillon was arrested and prosecuted for one of the most stigmatizing crimes a person can face.”
Dillon lives more than 300 miles from Jacksonville Beach, and a police search of a license plate reader database found no evidence he was in the area when the alleged crime was committed, the lawsuit said. Dillon was flagged as the suspect based on a low-quality image, specifically a photo taken of a McDonald’s computer screen that was displaying video surveillance footage, the lawsuit said.
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lawsuit was filed today in US District Court for the Middle District of Florida. The defendants are the City of Jacksonville Beach, Jacksonville Beach Police Corporal Scott O’Connell, Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, and Sergeant James Walters of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.
The wrong facial identification match came from the Face Analysis Comparison and Examination System (FACES), “the centralized facial recognition database maintained by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office,” the lawsuit said. The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office has access to the system and uses it to conduct searches for itself and “partner agencies, including the Jacksonville Beach PD,” the lawsuit said. Walters was responsible for conducting or overseeing those searches and for transmitting results to other agencies, the lawsuit said.
<small>Source: Ars Technica</small>
