NYPD Facial Recognition System Allegedly Produced Erroneous Match That Reportedly Resulted in Wrongful Detention of Trevis Williams

April 21, 2025

The New York Police Department's facial recognition system reportedly produced an erroneous match, leading to the wrongful detention of Trevis Williams. Despite apparent physical differences and exculpatory phone data, Williams was arrested, jailed for over two days, and charged. The case was later dismissed.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.644, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.637, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.631, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: new-york-police-department, nypd
Alleged developer: unknown-facial-recognition-system-developer
Alleged harmed parties: trevis-williams, judicial-integrity, judicial-system, law-enforcement, general-public, general-public-of-new-york

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1191

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.