Williams is a husband and father of two girls from Metro Detroit, Michigan. Since being wrongfully arrested due to a faulty facial recognition match, he has worked to raise awareness about the dangers of the technologyn January 9, 2020, Detroit Police Department officers arrested me on my front lawn in Farmington Hills, Michigan, in front of my wife and two young daughters, for a crime I had nothing to do with.
This week we finally reached a settlement in my wrongful arrest lawsuit against the City of Detroit that ensures what happened to me won’t happen again. Case in point, the system somehow returned my expired driver’s license photo as an “investigative lead” that might match the thief. Rather than investigate the accuracy of this purported match, police accepted the “lead,” putting my photo in a lineup along with five other photos of Black men—each of whom lookedphotos looked similar enough to the thief to be a possible match. The witness chose my photo out of this rigged lineup. And that is all the evidence DPD relied upon to arrest me.
In a more just world, the cops would be banned from using this technology altogether. While this settlement couldn’t go that far, the DPD’s use of this dangerous and racist technology will now be much more tightly controlled. They will not be able to conduct a photo lineup based solely on a lead derived from facial recognition.