Wrongful Arrest Exposes Failures in One of the Oldest Police Face-Recognition Tools in the US

The ACLU is suing two Florida police departments over the arrest of a Fort Myers man in a child-abduction case, saying officers treated a flawed face recognition match as a near-certain ID. A Florida man was wrongfully arrested for attempting to illegally lure a child after police relied on a face recognition match that was inaccurate, according to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday, even though he lived more than 300 miles from the scene and says he had never set foot in the city where the crime took place. Robert Dillon, a 52-year-old commercial crabber from Fort Myers, was arrested after FACES--a face recognition system operated by Florida's Pinellas County Sheriff's Office--matched his face against a photo of a man on a computer screen taken with a cellphone. The system returned a "93 percent match on facial features," according to police investigatory notes. The scores it emits represent how much two images look alike to the algorithm.