Surveillance cameras on a street in San Francisco, one of the municipalities that have banned or limited the use of facial-recognition tools in recent years.
Photo: john g mabanglo/Shutterstock
A New Jersey man is suing local authorities who he says wrongly arrested him based on a false facial-recognition match, in a case that risks further inflaming debate over the utility and accuracy of the fast-emerging technology.
The man, 33-year-old Nijeer Parks, spent more than a week in jail after police detained him in February 2019 on charges of shoplifting, assault and drug possession related to a Jan. 26 incident that year at a Hampton Inn hotel in Woodbridge, N.J., according to a complaint filed in New Jersey Superior Court.
The criminal case was dismissed in November 2019, according to a court official in Middlesex County, where Woodbridge is located. Mr. Parks is now seeking unspecified damages, according to the complaint, over allegations including false arrest, civil-rights violations and emotional distress.
The New Jersey state police, Woodbridge police and prosecutors in Middlesex County didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. New York state police officials, whom the Woodbridge police sent photographs for facial-recognition comparison, said their records showed they didn’t provide any leads in the case.
Police increasingly have adopted facial-recognition software into their crime-solving arsenal. Advocates say it is an effective new technology that has helped solve many cases, but the tools have drawn growing scrutiny in law enforcement in part because of the potential consequences of a false match.
Many facial-recognition algorithms have been shown to be less accurate on Black and other nonwhite people, heightening concerns that the technology’s use by law enforcement could contribute to racial bias in policing. In a separate case this year, a Detroit man, Robert Williams, was detained for more than a day based on a facial-recognition match to a suspect in a theft of watches; his case was also reportedly dismissed for lack of evidence. Mr. Williams, like Mr. Parks, is Black.
It couldn’t be learned what facial-recognition software police used in Mr. Parks’s case. The news site NJ.com previously reported on the lawsuit.
Jurisdictions have increasingly banned governments and police from using facial recognition because of concerns about the technology. San Francisco was the first U.S. city to do so, passing a ban last year. Portland, Ore., enacted one of the strictest such measures in the country in September, covering police and city departments as well as retail outlets.
Some makers of facial-recognition tools have pulled back on the technology over concerns about its potential for racial bias. Amazon.com Inc. in June suspended police use of its facial-recognition software. Microsoft Corp. said it wouldn’t sell the technology to police until a national law is enacted to regulate its use. International Business Machines Corp. decided not to offer general-purpose facial-recognition software at all.
Mr. Parks’s case sprang from an alleged theft at a hotel gift shop, according to police reports. Hotel staff alerted police, and when they arrived, the suspect gave them what they later determined was a fake Tennessee driver’s license. Officers then saw a large bag of what appeared to be marijuana in his jacket and began to arrest the suspect, who fled the scene in a Dodge Challenger. The suspect crashed the car in the process but still managed to get away.
Police in January last year submitted the picture from the driver’s license to investigators in New Jersey and New York for facial-recognition analysis, according to a police report. Authorities from two other departments responded that they had a “high profile comparison” to Mr. Parks, which led Woodbridge police to seek and obtain an arrest warrant.
Mr. Parks had served jail time for drug-related convictions, but Daniel Sexton, his lawyer, said he had turned his life around in recent years and found steady work. Mr. Parks had never been to Woodbridge before getting word of the warrant and didn’t know where it was located, Mr. Sexton said.
Police arrested Mr. Parks after learning from his grandmother that Woodbridge authorities were looking for him, according to Mr. Parks’s complaint against city officials and prosecutors. A cousin drove him to the Woodbridge police department to clear up what he thought was an obvious case of mistaken identity, the complaint says. Instead, police interrogated and arrested Mr. Parks, the complaint states, before they released him days later.
Write to Asa Fitch at [email protected]
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