GA Police Relied on Hidden Facial Recognition Technology to Falsely Arrest and Lock Up the Wrong Black Man

From [HERE] On the Friday afternoon after Thanksgiving, Randal Quran Reid was driving his white Jeep to his mother’s home outside Atlanta when he was pulled over on a busy highway. A police officer approached his vehicle and asked for his driver’s license. Reid had left it at home, but he volunteered his name. After asking Reid if he had any weapons, the officer told him to step out of the Jeep and handcuffed him with the help of two other officers who had arrived. 

“What did I do?” Reid asked. The officer said he had two theft warrants out of Baton Rouge and Jefferson Parish, a district on the outskirts of New Orleans. Reid was confused; he said he had never been to Louisiana.

Reid, a transportation analyst, was booked at the DeKalb County jail, to await extradition from Georgia to Louisiana. It took days to find out exactly what he was accused of: using stolen credit cards to buy designer purses.

“I’m locked up for something I have no clue about,” Reid, 29, said.

His parents made phone calls, hired lawyers and spent thousands of dollars to figure out why the police thought he was responsible for the crime, eventually discovering it was because Reid bore a resemblance to a suspect who had been recorded by a surveillance camera. The case eventually fell apart, and the warrants were recalled, but only after Reid spent six days in jail and missed a week of work. 

Reid’s wrongful arrest appears to be the result of a cascade of technologies — beginning with a bad facial recognition match — that are intended to make policing more effective and efficient but can also make it far too easy to apprehend the wrong person for a crime. None of the technologies are mentioned in official documents, and Reid was not told exactly why he had been arrested, a typical but troubling practice, according to legal experts and public defenders.

“In a democratic society, we should know what tools are being used to police us,” said Jennifer Granick, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union.

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In a panic, Reid’s family immediately retained an Atlanta lawyer from the Cochran Firm. He could not get Reid out of jail, and he struggled to gather more information. He suggested that the family members hire someone in Louisiana, so they cold-called law firms in Jefferson Parish and Baton Rouge until they found Thomas Calogero, a criminal defense lawyer. They retained him that Sunday. 

Calogero found out that Reid was accused of the summer thefts of two Chanel purses and a brown Louis Vuitton bag, collectively worth almost $13,000, from Second Act, a consignment store on the outskirts of New Orleans. Calogero went to the store and talked to the owner, who showed him a still from a surveillance camera. He realized that one of the alleged fraudsters looked like Reid, but the man was heavier. 

“The guy had big arms, and my client doesn’t,” Calogero said. A Jefferson Parish sheriff’s officer insisted it was a “positive match,” language that made Calogero believe that facial recognition technology had been used, and he spoke to the New Orleans news outlet NOLA.com about what he believed had happened. 

A person with direct knowledge of the investigation confirmed to The New York Times that facial recognition technology had been used to identify Reid. Yet none of the documents used to arrest him disclosed that.

Andrew Bartholomew, the Jefferson Parish financial crimes detective who sought the warrant to arrest Reid, wrote in an affidavit only that he had been “advised by a credible source” that the “heavyset black male” was Reid. Reached by phone, Bartholomew declined to comment. [MORE]