An arrest on a false match in Detroit
On 9 January 2020 Detroit police arrested Robert Williams on the lawn in front of his house in Farmington Hills, in view of his wife and two daughters. The basis was an erroneous face recognition identification from security footage of a Shinola store, where five watches had been taken in October 2018. Williams was released around 9 p.m. the next day, some thirty hours later.
Why it matters
Until then the accuracy gap was a number in a table. Here it became a day in custody, and the document that recorded it is not a study but a complaint against a police department. The atlas holds a measurement of this kind of error from December 2019 and no record at all of what such an error costs a person; this record fills exactly that gap.
The sequence as the ACLU of Michigan's complaint of 24 June 2020 sets it out: in October 2018 a store guard saw footage of an unidentified black man in a St. Louis Cardinals hat taking five watches. For about five months nothing was done; in March 2019 the police arranged a face recognition search, which falsely identified Williams. For about four more months nothing was done; in July 2019 six photographs, one of them Williams's driver's licence picture, were shown to that same guard, a person who had not witnessed the incident and had watched the same footage the police already held. That identification produced an arrest warrant. Under interrogation the next day the investigating officer said the computer must have got it wrong, but Williams was not released then: he was arraigned first and let out only after dark. The charges were later dropped without prejudice, leaving them open to be brought again. The record names neither the vendor nor the algorithm: neither source gives them. Nor does it claim this was the first such arrest in the United States; that claim appears in neither the complaint nor the reporting, only in accounts of them.