HISPI Project Cerebellum
AI Incidents

Police Use of Facial Recognition Software Causes Wrongful Arrests Without Defendant Knowledge

October 6, 2024

Police departments across the U.S. have used facial recognition software to identify suspects in criminal investigations, leading to multiple false arrests and wrongful detentions. The software's unreliability, especially in identifying people of color, has resulted in misidentifications that were not disclosed to defendants. In some cases, individuals were unaware that facial recognition played a role in their arrest, violating their legal rights and leading to unjust detentions.
Alleged deployer
police-departments, evansville-pd, pflugerville-pd, jefferson-parish-sheriff's-office, miami-pd, west-new-york-pd, nypd, coral-springs-pd, arvada-pd
Alleged developer
clearview-ai
Alleged harmed parties
quran-reid, francisco-arteaga, defendants-wrongfully-accused-by-facial-recognition

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/815

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.