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posted by chromas on Friday July 17 2020, @02:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the if-you-have-nothing-to-hide-y—oh-wait dept.

Facial recognition linked to a second wrongful arrest by Detroit police:

A false facial recognition match has led to the arrest of another innocent person. According to the Detroit Free Press, police in the city arrested a man for allegedly reaching into a person's car, taking their phone and throwing it, breaking the case and damaging the screen in the process.

Facial recognition flagged Michael Oliver as a possible suspect, and the victim identified him in a photo lineup as the person who damaged their phone. Oliver was charged with a felony count of larceny over the May 2019 incident. He said he didn't commit the crime and the evidence supported his claim.

The perpetrator, who was recorded in footage captured on a phone, doesn't look like Oliver. For one thing, he has tattoos on his arms, and there aren't any visible on the person in the video. When Oliver's attorney took photos of him to the victim and an assistant prosecutor, they agreed Oliver had been misidentified. A judge later dismissed the case.

[...] Late last month, Detroit Police Chief James Craig suggested the technology the department uses, which was created by DataWorks Plus, isn't always reliable. "If we were just to use the technology by itself, to identify someone, I would say 96 percent of the time it would misidentify," he said in a public meeting, according to Motherboard. From the start of the year through June 22nd, the force used the software 70 times per the department's public data. In all but two of those cases, the person whose image the technology analyzed was Black.


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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2020, @03:36AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2020, @03:36AM (#1022733)

    Nah... Michael Oliver is white. The facial recognition software isn't calibrated for white balance.

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  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday July 18 2020, @03:20AM

    by driverless (4770) on Saturday July 18 2020, @03:20AM (#1023228)

    Interesting that you mention that, when I read the summary I immediately thought "I wonder if Michael Oliver is black?". Went to the DFP web site, which has a photo, and sure enough... who woulda thought that a system trained on white males would get it totally wrong on a black guy?