June, 24 2020, 12:00am EDT
Man Wrongfully Arrested Because Face Recognition Can't Tell Black People Apart
ACLU calls on lawmakers to immediately stop law enforcement use of face recognition technology.
WASHINGTON
Robert Williams, a Black man and Michigan resident, was wrongfully arrested because of a false face recognition match, according to an administrative complaint filed today by the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. This is the first known case of someone being wrongfully arrested in the United States because of this technology, though there are likely many more cases like Robert's that remain unknown.
Detroit police handcuffed Robert on his front lawn in front of his wife and two terrified girls, ages two and five. The police took him to a detention center about forty minutes away, where he was locked up overnight in a cramped and filthy cell. Robert's fingerprints, DNA sample, and mugshot were put on file. After an officer acknowledged during an interrogation the next afternoon that "the computer must have gotten it wrong," Robert was finally released -- nearly 30 hours after his arrest. Still, the government continues to stonewall Robert's repeated attempts to learn more about what led to his wrongful arrest, in violation of a court order and of its obligations under the Michigan Freedom of Information Act.
Robert is keenly aware that his encounter with the police could have proven deadly for a Black man like him. He recounts the whole ordeal in an op-ed published by the Washington Post and a video published by the ACLU.
"I never thought I'd have to explain to my daughters why daddy got arrested," saysRobert Williams in the op-ed. "How does one explain to two young girls that the computer got it wrong, but the police listened to it anyway?"
While Robert was locked up, his wife Melissa had to explain to his boss why Robert wouldn't show up to work next morning. She also had to explain to their daughters where their dad was and when he would come back. Robert's daughters have since taken to playing games involving arresting people, and have accused Robert of stealing things from them.
Robert was arrested on suspicion of stealing watches from Shinola, a Detroit watch shop. Detroit police sent an image of the suspect captured by the shop's surveillance camera to Michigan State Police, who ran the image through its database of driver's licenses. Face recognition software purchased from DataWorks Plus by Michigan police combed through the driver's license photos and falsely identified Robert Williams as the suspect.
Based off the erroneous match, Detroit police put Robert's driver's license photo in a photo lineup and showed it to the shop's offsite security consultant, who never witnessed the alleged robbery firsthand. The consultant, based only on a review of the blurry surveillance image, identified Robert as the culprit.
"Every step the police take after an identification -- such as plugging Robert's driver's license photo into a poorly executed and rigged photo lineup -- is informed by the false identification and tainted by the belief that they already have the culprit," said Victoria Burton-Harris and Phil Mayor, attorneys representing Robert Williams, in an ACLU blog post published today. "Evidence to the contrary -- like the fact that Robert looks markedly unlike the suspect, or that he was leaving work in a town 40 minutes from Detroit at the time of the robbery -- is likely to be dismissed, devalued, or simply never sought in the first place...When you add a racist and broken technology to a racist and broken criminal legal system, you get racist and broken outcomes. When you add a perfect technology to a broken and racist legal system, you only automate that system's flaws and render it a more efficient tool of oppression."
Numerous studies, including a recent study by the National Institutes of Science and Technology, have found that face recognition technology is flawed and biased, misidentifying Black and Asian people up to 100 times more often than white people. Despite this, an untold number of law enforcement agencies nationwide are using the technology, often in secret and without any democratic oversight.
"The sheer scope of police face recognition use in this country means that others have almost certainly been -- and will continue to be -- misidentified, if not arrested and charged for crimes they didn't commit," said Clare Garvie,senior associate with Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy & Technology in an ACLU blog post.
The ACLU has long been warning that face recognition technology is dangerous when right, and dangerous when wrong.
"Even if this technology does become accurate (at the expense of people like me), I don't want my daughters' faces to be part of some government database," adds Williams in his op-ed. "I don't want cops showing up at their door because they were recorded at a protest the government didn't like. I don't want this technology automating and worsening the racist policies we're protesting."
The ACLU has also been leading nationwide efforts to defend privacy rights and civil liberties against the growing threat of face recognition surveillance, and is calling on Congress to immediately stop the use and funding of the technology.
"Lawmakers need to stop allowing law enforcement to test their latest tools on our communities, where real people suffer real-life consequences," said Neema Singh Guliani, ACLU senior legislative counsel. "It's past time for lawmakers to prevent the continued use of this technology. What happened to the Williams family should never happen again."
Already, multiple localities have banned law enforcement use of face recognition technology as part of ACLU-led campaigns, including San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland, CA, as well as Cambridge, Springfield, and Somerville, MA. Following years of advocacy by the ACLU and coalition partners, pressure from Congress, and nationwide protests against police brutality, Amazon and Microsoft earlier this month said they will not sell face recognition technology to police for some time. They joined IBM and Google who previously said they would not be selling a general face recognition algorithm to the government. Microsoft and Amazon have yet to clarify their positions on sale of the technology to federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI and the DEA.
The ACLU is also suing the FBI, DEA, ICE, and CBP to learn more about how the agencies are using face recognition and what safeguards, if any, are in place to prevent rights violations and abuses. And the organization has taken Clearview AI to court in Illinois over its privacy-violating face recognition practices.
The op-ed by Robert Williams is here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/24/i-was-wrongfully-arrested-because-facial-recognition-why-are-police-allowed-use-this-technology/.
The administrative complaint filed today was first reported by the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recognition-arrest.html.
A blog post on the complaint filed today is here: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/wrongfully-arrested-because-face-recognition-cant-tell-black-people-apart.
A blog post with new information on the scope of police use of face recognition is here: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/the-untold-number-of-people-implicated-in-crimes-they-didnt-commit-because-of-face-recognition.
A video about the Williams family ordeal is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfgi9A9PfLU&feature=youtu.be.
The administrative complaint filed today is here: https://www.aclu.org/letter/aclu-michigan-complaint-re-use-facial-recognition.
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
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'Seismic Win for Workers': FTC Bans Noncompete Clauses
Advocates praised the FTC "for taking a strong stance against this egregious use of corporate power, thereby empowering workers to switch jobs and launch new ventures, and unlocking billions of dollars in worker earnings."
Apr 23, 2024
U.S. workers' rights advocates and groups celebrated on Tuesday after the Federal Trade Commission voted 3-2 along party lines to approve a ban on most noncompete clauses, which Democratic FTC Chair Lina Khansaid "keep wages low, suppress new ideas, and rob the American economy of dynamism."
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As Economic Policy Institute (EPI) president Heidi Shierholz explained, "Noncompete agreements are employment provisions that ban workers at one company from working for, or starting, a competing business within a certain period of time after leaving a job."
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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has suggested it plans to file a lawsuit that, as The American Prospectdetailed, "could more broadly threaten the rulemaking authority the FTC cited when proposing to ban noncompetes."
Already, the tax services and software provider Ryan has filed a legal challenge in federal court in Texas, arguing that the FTC is unconstitutionally structured.
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Morgan Harper, director of policy and advocacy at the American Economic Liberties Project, praised the FTC for "listening to the comments of thousands of entrepreneurs and workers of all income levels across industries" and finalizing a rule that "is a clear-cut win."
Demand Progress' Emily Peterson-Cassin similarly commended the commission "for taking a strong stance against this egregious use of corporate power, thereby empowering workers to switch jobs and launch new ventures, and unlocking billions of dollars in worker earnings."
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Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC) executive director Mike Pierce pointed out that the FTC on Tuesday "recognized the harmful role debt plays in the workplace, including the growing use of training repayment agreement provisions, or TRAPs, and took action to outlaw TRAPs and all other employer-driven debt that serve the same functions as noncompete agreements."
Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at Open Markets Institute, highlighted that the addition came after his group, SBPC, and others submitted comments on the "significant gap" in the commission's initial January 2023 proposal, and also welcomed that "the final rule prohibits both conventional noncompete clauses and newfangled versions like TRAPs."
Jonathan Harris, a Loyola Marymount University law professor and SBPC senior fellow, said that "by also banning functional noncompetes, the rule stays one step ahead of employers who use 'stay-or-pay' contracts as workarounds to existing restrictions on traditional noncompetes. The FTC has decided to try to avoid a game of whack-a-mole with employers and their creative attorneys, which worker advocates will applaud."
Among those applauding was Jean Ross, president of National Nurses United, who said that "the new FTC rule will limit the ability of employers to use debt to lock nurses into unsafe jobs and will protect their role as patient advocates."
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Democracy defenders on Tuesday hailed a ruling from a U.S. federal judge striking down a 19th-century North Carolina law criminalizing people who vote while on parole, probation, or post-release supervision due to a felony conviction.
In Monday's decision, U.S. District Judge Loretta C. Biggs—an appointee of former Democratic President Barack Obama—sided with the North Carolina A. Philip Randolph Institute and Action NC, who argued that the 1877 law discriminated against Black people.
"The challenged statute was enacted with discriminatory intent, has not been cleansed of its discriminatory taint, and continues to disproportionately impact Black voters," Biggs wrote in her 25-page ruling.
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"We are ecstatic that the court found in our favor and struck down this racially discriminatory law that has been arbitrarily enforced over time," Action NC executive director Pat McCoy said in a statement. "We will now be able to help more people become civically engaged without fear of prosecution for innocent mistakes. Democracy truly won today!"
Voting rights tracker Democracy Docket noted that Monday's ruling "does not have any bearing on North Carolina's strict felony disenfranchisement law, which denies the right to vote for those with felony convictions who remain on probation, parole, or a suspended sentence—often leaving individuals without voting rights for many years after release from incarceration."
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"It also makes our democracy better and ensures that North Carolina is not able to unjustly criminalize innocent individuals with felony convictions who are valued members of our society, specifically Black voters who were the target of this law," Brown added.
North Carolina officials have not said whether they will appeal Biggs' ruling. The state Department of Justice said it was reviewing the decision.
According to Forward Justice—a nonpartisan law, policy, and strategy center dedicated to advancing racial, social, and economic justice in the U.S. South, "Although Black people constitute 21% of the voting-age population in North Carolina, they represent 42% of the people disenfranchised while on probation, parole, or post-release supervision."
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"Judge Biggs' decision will help ensure that voters who mistakenly think they are eligible to cast a ballot will not be criminalized for simply trying to re-engage in the political process and perform their civic duty."
In what one civil rights leader called "the largest expansion of voting rights in this state since the 1965 Voting Rights Act," a three-judge state court panel voted 2-1 in 2021 to restore voting rights to approximately 55,000 formerly incarcerated felons. The decision made North Carolina the only Southern state to automatically restore former felons' voting rights.
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Roughly 4.3 million U.S. workers will now be eligible for overtime pay under a new rule finalized Tuesday by President Joe Biden's Labor Department—in stark contrast to his Republican predecessor's rules that severely limited the number of workers who were eligible for required compensation when they worked more than 40 hours per week.
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