After Being Sued for Getting It Wrong – Jacksonville Police Keep Getting It Wrong

There is something very scary about the wrongful arrest of a father described in this week’s Biometric Update and Florida Trib reporting. It concerns the use of facial-recognition technology by police departments.

A man was communicating with an undercover officer he believed was a 13-year-old girl. The guy sent two photographs of another man — his former friend, identified in the reporting as “Nick” because, according to the man, the other guy was better looking. Police ran those photographs through FACESNXT facial-recognition system. The system produced Nick, so police arrested Nick.

The problem? Nick wasn’t the guy communicating with the minor and investigators apparently failed to do any basic investigative work beyond relying on the facial recognition match. Had they done any investigation, they would have learned that the account used was readily traceable to the actual perpetrator and the account profile photograph was of the perpetrator not Nick.

Had they done any investigation, information would have pointed toward the actual suspect. But it simply wasn’t obtained before an innocent man was arrested.

Nick was charged with soliciting a child via computer and unlawful use of a two-way communications device. He spent time in jail. A court ordered him to stay away from his own children. He was put on an ankle monitor. He lost his job. His family estimates the financial damage at roughly $45,000. Meanwhile, they actual perpetrator remained free for months.

Eventually, when the facts came to light investigators confronted the perpetrator, who admitted using photographs of Nick. Charges against Nick were dropped, and a judge later ordered his case expunged because the arrest had been made “contrary to law or by mistake.” Yet the court records remained publicly available for a while afterward and once on the internet, it never goes away.

The Jacksonville police are already involved in a lawsuit after making several wrongful arrests using facial recognition technology. In one case In one case, a man was arrested after facial recognition returned his photograph as a candidate in an automobile-theft investigation. Officers reportedly characterized the result as an “85% match.” Only problem was that the man was actually about 400 miles away—when the crime occurred. He spent nearly three months in jail before the charges were dropped. Another man was arrested after facial recognition identified him as a possible suspect in an alleged child-luring incident in Jacksonville Beach. Only problem in that one, was that the guy lived more than 300 miles away and said he had never been to Jacksonville Beach.

Police will blame facial recognition for the mistakes, but technology didn’t arrest these guys. Police did.

As people on the registry, whose images and complete information is out there in the public view on the registry, we are already suspects without doing anything. The use of clearly imperfect technology, along with the lack of diligence in police investigations, should give us something to be very worried about.

We wish these guys the best of luck in their investigations!