Police departments have said generally that they use facial matches only as an investigative lead and that criminal charges should come only in cases where other evidence can be found. But Murphy's lawsuit suggests that it played a critical role in steering officers to him in the first place, and that the confidence authorities placed in the automated results may have "primed" witnesses and investigators to believe Murphy was at fault without substantial evidence.

After being charged in court with robbery and carjacking, Ms. Woodruff was released that evening on a $100,000 personal bond. In an interview, she said she went straight to the hospital where she was diagnosed with dehydration and given two bags of intravenous fluids. A month later, the Wayne County prosecutor dismissed the case against her. The ordeal started with an automated facial recognition search, according to an investigator's report from the Detroit Police Department. Ms. Woodruff is the sixth person to report being falsely accused of a crime as a result of facial recognition technology used by police to match an unknown offender's face to a photo in a database.

The Detroit department is also among hundreds of police agencies that have used Clearview AI, a facial recognition tool that searches through a large database of photos taken from across the Internet, according to a BuzzFeed News report earlier this month based on data from a confidential source. Neither the Detroit police nor Clearview have confirmed the report, and it does not appear Clearview was used in Williams's case.

A false facial recognition match has led to the arrest of another innocent person. According to the Detroit Free Press, police in the city arrested a man for allegedly reaching into a person's car, taking their phone and throwing it, breaking the case and damaging the screen in the process. Facial recognition flagged Michael Oliver as a possible suspect, and the victim identified him in a photo lineup as the person who damaged their phone. Oliver was charged with a felony count of larceny over the May 2019 incident. He said he didn't commit the crime and the evidence supported his claim.