Another Black Man Arrested Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match - Locked Up 10 Days, case dismissed for lack of evidence

From {HERE] In February 2019, Nijeer Parks was accused of shoplifting candy and trying to hit a police officer with a car at a Hampton Inn in Woodbridge, N.J. The police had identified him using facial recognition software, even though he was 30 miles away at the time of the incident.

Mr. Parks spent 10 days in jail and paid around $5,000 to defend himself. In November 2019, the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.

Mr. Parks, 33, is now suing the police, the prosecutor and the City of Woodbridge for false arrest, false imprisonment and violation of his civil rights.

He is the third person known to be falsely arrested based on a bad facial recognition match. In all three cases, the people mistakenly identified by the technology have been Black men.

Facial recognition technology is known to have flaws. In 2019, a national study of over 100 facial recognition algorithms found that they did not work as well on Black and Asian faces. Two other Black men — Robert Williams and Michael Oliver, who both live in the Detroit area — were also arrested for crimes they did not commit based on bad facial recognition matches. Like Mr. Parks, Mr. Oliver sued over the wrongful arrest.

Nathan Freed Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who believes that the police should stop using face recognition technology, said the three cases demonstrated “how this technology disproportionately harms the Black community.”

“Multiple people have now come forward about being wrongfully arrested because of this flawed and privacy-invading surveillance technology,” Mr. Wessler said. He worries that there have been other arrests and even mistaken convictions that have not been uncovered.

Law enforcement often defends the use of facial recognition, despite its flaws, by saying it is used only as a clue in a case and will not lead directly to an arrest. But Mr. Parks’s experience is another example of an arrest based almost solely on a suggested match by the technology.

The Crime

On a Saturday in January 2019, two police officers showed up at the Hampton Inn in Woodbridge after receiving a report about a man stealing snacks from the gift shop. [MORE]