The New York Police Department is one of the most heavily equipped police forces on the planet. With over 48,000 full-time staff and a budget nearing $6 billion, the NYPD’s access to immense resources put it closer to the military force of entire countries like the Philippines and Iraq than a municipal agency.
With that kind of coin to play around with, it’s probably no surprise that the NYPD would throw a little toward tech. Between 2007 and 2020, the department has spent over $2.8 billion amassing a virtual toy chest of surveillance tech, including stingray phone trackers, crime prediction software, and even X-ray vans.
Among the NYPD’s most contentious technologies is a facial recognition suite it’s been building since 2011 — a system that recently led to the arrest of a man who was a whole head taller than the original suspect.
As the New York Times reports, a father named Trevis Williams was wrongly arrested on April 21 after the NYPD’s facial recognition software lumped him in with a group of “possible matches” based on grainy CCTV video.
Investigators were trying to identify a man who exposed himself to a woman two months earlier in February. After feeding their algorithm low quality footage of the crime, it spat out six faces of identical looking men — all African American with facial hair and dreadlocks, the NYT reports.
The AI selection on its own was “not probably cause to arrest,” and an investigator noted that anyone identified from the NYPD database by the facial recognition system was only a potential suspect.
Still, detectives included Williams’ image in the photo lineup anyway — a notoriously unreliable process even without the AI dystopia factor. When the victim confidently asserted that Williams was the perpetrator, police had the probable cause they needed to flag him as a suspect.
Williams was later identified by subway police in Brooklyn and hauled in for questioning, according to the NYT. Despite being 12 miles away from the crime when it happened, not to mention eight inches taller and about 70 pounds heavier than the man they were looking for, Williams was still arrested and held in jail for more than two days.
“That’s not me, man, I swear to God, that’s not me,” he told police at the time. “Of course you’re going to say that wasn’t you,” the detective reportedly responded.
Though the charge against Williams was finally dismissed in July — and the investigation into the public lewdness case closed altogether — the whole ordeal is a frightening look at what can happen when police play fast and loose with tech and the law in order to score an arrest.
At least three other Black people have been similarly arrested by police using facial recognition in Detroit, prompting legal advocates to push the agency to adopt stringent rules establishing the use of facial recognition software to assemble lineups. The NYPD has no such safeguards in place, and it’s unclear whether it will anytime soon.
More on policing: OpenAI Says It’s Scanning Users’ Conversations and Reporting Content to the Police
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