Alleged Misuse of Facial Recognition Technology by Law Enforcement Reportedly Leading to Wrongful Arrests and Violations of Investigative Standards
January 13, 2025
Law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have allegedly been misusing AI-powered facial recognition technology, leading to wrongful arrests and significant harm to at least eight individuals. Officers have reportedly been bypassing investigative standards, relying on uncorroborated AI matches to build cases, allegedly resulting in prolonged detentions, reputational damage, and personal trauma.
- Alleged deployer
- florence-kentucky-police-department, evansville-indiana-police-department, detroit-police-department, coral-springs-florida-police-department, bradenton-florida-police-department, austin-police-department
- Alleged developer
- developers-of-mugshot-recognition-software, developers-of-law-enforcement-facial-recognition-software, clearview-ai
- Alleged harmed parties
- wrongfully-arrested-individuals, vulnerable-communities, robert-williams, quran-reid, porcha-woodruff, people-of-color, nijeer-parks, jason-vernau, christopher-gatlin, black-people, alonzo-sawyer
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/896
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.