Pregnant Black Woman The Latest Victim Of Detroit PD Facial Recognition False Positive
from the getting-it-wrong-as-pattern-and-practice dept
Facial recognition tech is faulty. It’s an unavoidable fact, especially when it comes to women and minorities. No matter how good the tech, the potential for false positives and negatives remains. And pre-existing biases are amplified by things the tech simply can’t do well: reliably identify people who aren’t white and male.
Detroit law enforcement should be well aware of the tech’s shortcomings. After all, it’s already been involved in multiple bogus arrests based on nothing more than conclusions drawn by admittedly faulty tech.
The Detroit PD has earned itself another PR black eye (and civil rights lawsuit) by deciding whatever the AI spits out is actionable, despite being shown otherwise on multiple occasions. Here’s Kashmir Hill with the report on the PD’s latest debacle for the New York Times:
Porcha Woodruff was getting her two daughters ready for school when six police officers showed up at her door in Detroit. They asked her to step outside because she was under arrest for robbery and carjacking.
“Are you kidding?” she recalled saying to the officers. Ms. Woodruff, 32, said she gestured at her stomach to indicate how ill-equipped she was to commit such a crime: She was eight months pregnant.
Handcuffed in front of her home on a Thursday morning last February, leaving her crying children with her fiancé, Ms. Woodruff was taken to the Detroit Detention Center. She said she was held for 11 hours, questioned about a crime she said she had no knowledge of, and had her iPhone seized to be searched for evidence.
The false positive might have seemed harmless to the Detroit PD. But it wasn’t for the pregnant Woodruff. In addition to the harms listed above, Woodruff was charged with robbery and carjacking. Her bail was set at $100,000. The only good thing about this was that jailers were attentive and sent her to a hospital to be treated for dehydration.
The department’s chief, James E. White, has admitted the facts of this blown case are “concerning” and is promising to look into this. The local prosecutor, Kym Worthy, is far less repentant, insisting the “facts” of the case indicate the arrest warrant issued based on faulty tech was “appropriate.” Worthy insists this is true despite dropping the criminal charges against Woodruff a month after her false arrrest.
We’ll see how these arguments stack up in court. As is to be expected, Woodruff is suing [PDF] the Detroit PD over the rights violations instigated by its reckless use of its tech. The suit helpfully includes all the paperwork [PDF] generated by the Detroit PD prior to its decision to arrest a pregnant woman for a crime she didn’t commit.
That paperwork shows the Detroit PD relies on DataWorks Plus supplies the tech. It also shows the PD places blind trust in its decisions. It used a “six-pack” to identify the suspect. This set of six mug shots were generated by the tech and given to the crime victim, who decided an eight-year-old photo of Woodruff looked enough like the alleged criminal (despite the PD having access to Woodruff’s most recent photo from her 2021 driver’s license renewal) to give the PD all the “probable cause” it needed to arrest someone who the crime victim never described as a visibly pregnant woman.
The biggest obstacle to justice remains the judicially created notion of qualified immunity. Detroit cops are swimming in uncharted AI waters with their reliance on unproven tech. Ignorance works in their favor. The less they know, the more likely they are to convince courts their actions were “reasonable.” After all, there’s no precedent stating otherwise.
While Woodruff may be destined for a courtroom loss or, at best, a settlement tied to exculpatory statements from the city and the PD, her lawsuit will at least force federal courts to take a closer look at rights violations predicated on inaccurate software. Woodrufff will hopefully be compensated for her ordeal. But for things to change permanently, we’ll need courts to determine what is or isn’t “reasonable” when cops utilize faulty tech to generate probable cause.
Filed Under: detroit, detroit pd, facial recognition, false arrest, false positive, kym worthy, porcha woodruff
Companies: dataworks plus