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Department of Injustice
Jalil Richardson of North Carolina is free after spending over 50 days in jail after being wrongfully arrested for a crime he did not commit.
According to Action News Jax, Richardson was initially accused of stealing a vehicle in Jacksonville, Florida, after police fed surveillance video from a private business into their AI-integrated facial recognition system.
The system then identified Richardson with what it said was an 85 percent facial recognition match, the Florida attorney’s office told Jax. Paired with two “eyewitness” accounts, it was enough to establish probable cause against Richardson, even though he’d been clocked into his job hundreds of miles away when the crime took place.
After being arrested and made to spend nearly two months in custody, Richardson and his lawyers were finally able to establish his alibi in court, forcing prosecutors to drop the case — an infuriating miscarriage of justice, and quite possibly a sign of things to come as cops across the country embrace flawed facial recognition systems as a shortcut to investigating crimes.
“There was no proper investigation done to even reach out to me or to see if I was even in Florida,” Richardson told Jax. “And I sat in there for over 50 days in the most worst jail ever.”
Wrongful arrests based on AI facial recognition software are becoming something of a pattern with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. Their first victim was Robert Dillon, a “93 percent match” who was wrongfully accused of attempting to lure and kidnap a 12-year-old child.
Like Richardson, Dillon was a world away at the time — a five hour drive on the other side of the state.
According to privacy litigation director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation Adam Schwartz, it’s the 14th known case of a wrongful arrest due to facial recognition software.
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