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In January 2020, Robert Williams was arrested in front of his two young daughters after Detroit police relied on the result of a search conducted in a database of 49 million photos, which had found a match between his driver's license photo and a still image from surveillance footage of the scene of a theft committed by another person two years earlier
The investigators did not admit their mistake until Williams showed them the printout of the still image alongside his face. In February 2023, Porcha Woodruff was arrested and detained for eleven hours solely on the basis of the result of an automated facial recognition system. At the time of her arrest, Woodruff was eight months pregnant and, while in police custody, began having contractions.
The facial recognition system had matched her image with footage of a person (not visibly pregnant) who was stealing a car. Both Williams and Woodruff are Black, and the majority of the false positives produced by the facial recognition tools we know about have involved Black people.
