A 37-year-old woman has filed a lawsuit against Detroit police alleging that they used facial recognition technology to mistakenly identify and detain her while investigating an attempted murder case.
According to FOX 2 Detroit, the January 2024 incident occurred at the home of the plaintiff, LaDonna Crutchfield. Six police officers were said to have reported to her home to arrest her. The officers were investigating an assault with attempted murder case, and Crutchfield was wanted for interrogation.
“What am I going to jail?” the 37-year-old asked the officers who showed up to her home. The officers ultimately transported Crutchfield to the police station after they informed her that a warrant for her arrest had been issued.
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Crutchfield claimed the officers informed her that her appearance was similar to that of a woman linked to a Project Greenlight video. “They told her to get in the vehicle. Handcuffed her, walked down the street in front of her neighbors to see. It was just a false arrest,” Crutchfield’s attorney, Ivan Land, said.
“She asked him why do you think it’s me, because I’m fat and black like her? And he kinda laughed and said you gotta admit it does look like you.”
It was also alleged that authorities forcefully obtained Crutchfield’s DNA and fingerprints. She spent eight hours in detention before she was eventually released, FOX 2 Detroit reported.
“If you go out and you compare someone’s photo to someone, you go knock on their door, handcuff them take them to the police station, they almost lose their job, you arrest them in front of their children, this is bad,” Land said.
The suspect linked to the case in question is said to have opened fire during that incident. Land in the lawsuit stated that police matched Crutchfield to that suspect after they ran a database search. Assistant Detroit Police Chief Charles Fitzgerald, however, denied facial recognition technology was used.
“This case has nothing to do with facial (recognition),” Fitzgerald claimed. “There was an investigation done. The investigation led back to a partial plate. It was a house on the east side. That east side home let us back to our plaintiff. When they compare the image they got from a video just an image. They didn’t do any facial rec. It let us to this individual.”
Land, however, said that was not the case as there was no link between Crutchfield and the license plate.
This isn’t the first time the Detroit Police Department has come under scrutiny for its use of facial recognition technology as they have wrongfully arrested many people, including a Farmington Hills man. That particular individual and the department ultimately reached a settlement last year over his wrongful arrest, FOX 2 Detroit reported.
Per the terms of the settlement, Detroit police is barred from primarily using data from facial recognition to make arrests. The department cannot also conduct a facial recognition search before mainly using the results in a photo lineup.
As previously reported by Face2Face Africa, critics have long argued that facial recognition technology is skewed. Over the years, various studies have provided proof that facial recognition tools are often biased against minorities.
A 2019 study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology found that though the technology works relatively well on White men, it provides less accurate results for other demographics, and experts have blamed this on a lack of diversity in the images used to develop the databases.
