Man sues Florida cops over arrest spurred by "93% match" in facial recognition - Ars Technica
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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.
The 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.
The prosecution against Dillon was pending for over two months before “the State Attorney’s Office finally dropped all charges,” the lawsuit said. Alleging that Dillon was maliciously prosecuted, the lawsuit demands financial damages and changes in how the police and sheriffs’ offices use facial recognition technology.
Evidence showed “he could not have committed the crime”
Dillon is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Hoguet Newman Regal & Kenney law firm. “The police relied on an incorrect result from facial recognition technology to get an arrest warrant, while concealing evidence that showed he could not have committed the crime he was being accused of,” the ACLU said. “He is one of 15 known people to have this happen to them in the United States.”
The lawsuit said that “Dillon was arrested at his home in front of his wife” and “accused of attempting to lure a child—a charge carrying devastating social stigma and permanent reputational destruction. He was held overnight in jail, forced to borrow money and pledge the title to his truck to post bond, subjected to months of criminal prosecution, and publicly branded with a mugshot that remains accessible online, long after the charges were dropped.”
The arrest was carried out by the Lee County Sheriff’s Office and recorded by a deputy’s body camera. Dillon’s wife told the deputy that her husband had never been to Jacksonville Beach, and Dillon told the deputy that he hadn’t left Fort Myers in two years, the lawsuit said.
Shortly before midnight on November 2, 2023, Jacksonville Beach Police responded to a report of a man trying to lure or entice a minor inside a McDonald’s, the lawsuit said. A girl under the age of 12 told police “that a man had repeatedly asked her if she wanted to leave the restaurant with him. She told him no. The suspect approached her a second time and asked, ‘Are you sure?’ The victim called her mother, and the suspect left.” The victim’s parents were next door, at a hotel.
O’Connell had access to exculpatory and material information that he did not disclose in an affidavit used to obtain an arrest warrant from a...