Facial Recognition Misidentifies Pregnant Woman Leading to False Arrest in Detroit

February 16, 2023

Porcha Woodruff was falsely arrested due to an unreliable facial recognition match in Detroit. Despite being visibly pregnant, she was implicated in a robbery and carjacking based on an outdated photo used in a lineup. This incident underscores the importance of trustworthy AI practices and the need for effective governance.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.645, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.638, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.632, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: detroit-police-department
Alleged developer: unknown
Alleged harmed parties: porcha-woodruff

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/592

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.