Inaccurate Facial Recognition Causes Wrongful Arrest - Kimberlee Williams' Experience

June 23, 2021

Kimberlee Williams, residing in Oklahoma, was allegedly arrested on Maryland warrants due to a misleading facial recognition identification. According to the ACLU, Williams had never been to Maryland and the authorities failed to examine evidence supporting her alibi in Oklahoma. Consequently, she spent approximately six months in jail before the charges were dismissed.

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Alleged deployer

montgomery-county-police-department, anne-arundel-county-police-department, prince-george's-county-police-department

Alleged developer

unknown-facial-recognition-technology-developers

Alleged harmed parties

kimberlee-williams, wrongfully-arrested-individuals, epistemic-integrity

AI governance case studies

For forensic AI governance failure analysis (TAIMScore™ case studies), browse Human Signal’s Failure Files™.

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.