How Wrongful Arrests Based on AI Derailed 3 Men's Lives

Robert Williams was doing yard work with his family one afternoon last August when his daughter Julia said they needed a family meeting immediately. Once everyone was inside the house, the 7-year-old girl closed all the blinds and curtains and then told her sister and parents that she'd figured it out: Wooly Willy, a character from her toy, had stolen the watches that got her dad arrested. "She was like'We need to get to the bottom of this,'" her mother Melissa says. More recently, Melissa says, Julia has said she believes people who wear shirts that say "Detroit" represent the people who arrested her father. Williams was arrested in January 2020 for allegedly stealing five watches from a Shinola store in Detroit, after he was wrongfully identified by facial recognition software.