The New York Police Department’s use of facial recognition is under scrutiny after a false match led to the wrongful arrest of a Black man.
In February, a woman reported a delivery man — around 5 feet, 6 inches and 160 pounds — had exposed himself in a Manhattan building, according to The New York Times.
Two months later, police arrested Trevis Williams. Though he had a beard and wore his hair in braids, as the suspect allegedly had, Williams was 6 feet, 2 inches and 230 pounds. He spent two days in jail for a crime he didn’t commit.
“I was so angry … I was stressed out,” Williams told ABC7. “The man they were looking for, he was eight inches shorter than me and 70 pounds lighter.”
Williams was driving from Connecticut to Brooklyn, NY, on the day of the crime, with phone data placing him 12 miles away. Still, a facial recognition program flagged Williams’ mugshot, and the woman misidentified him as the flasher, the outlet stated.
“Because of the bias in who gets arrested in New York, it’s going to disproportionately target Black and Latino and Asian individuals,” said Albert Fox Cahn of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, per ABC7.
While the NYPD dropped the case against Williams in July, civil rights and privacy groups are demanding an investigation and highlighting the racial and other biases embedded in facial recognition algorithms.
In a letter to authorities, the Legal Aid Society, representing Williams, accused the NYPD of sidestepping legal restrictions on facial recognition. It claims the department relies on facial matches from outside its approved databases and uses other city agencies, like the New York City Fire Department, to perform actions it is legally barred from doing.
“Everyone, including the NYPD, knows that facial recognition technology is unreliable,” said Legal Aid attorney Diane Akerman, per ABC7. “Yet the NYPD disregards even its own protocols, which are meant to protect New Yorkers from the very real risk of false arrest and imprisonment. It’s clear they cannot be trusted with this technology, and elected officials must act now to ban its use by law enforcement.”
The NYPD maintains that it follows strict regulations and that facial recognition, which it claims has proven successful, is only a tool — not grounds for arrest.
Wrongful accusations based on false facial recognition matches not only reflect racial bias but can also have deadly consequences for people of color, AFROTECH™ previously reported.
In January 2024, Democratic senators sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland warning the Department of Justice about the harms of police use of facial recognition technology. They cited wrongful arrests in the Black community due to misidentification and urged the department to reconsider funding such technologies.
“Errors in facial recognition technology can upend the lives of American citizens,” the letter said,” per AFROTECH™. “Should evidence demonstrate that errors systematically discriminate against communities of color, then funding these technologies could facilitate violations of federal civil rights laws.”
