A Florida man was wrongfully arrested in November 2023 after police relied on a face-recognition match from FACES, a system operated by Pinellas County Sheriff's Office. Robert Dillon, a 52-year-old commercial crabber from Fort Myers, was arrested for allegedly attempting to illegally lure a child at a McDonald's in Jacksonville Beach, even though he lived over 300 miles away and had never visited the city. The system returned a '93 percent match on facial features,' according to police-investigatory notes, which the complaint says did not indicate the likelihood of the same person. The arrest led to significant personal and financial hardship for Dillon, including losing his home and being held overnight in a cold cell.
The incident unfolded shortly before midnight on November 2, 2023, when a man allegedly approached a girl under 12 at a McDonald's in Jacksonville Beach and asked her to leave with him. She refused, and after he approached her a second time, she called for her mother. The man left before police arrived. A Jacksonville Beach police officer later sent an attempt-to-identify bulletin using cell phone photos from surveillance footage, which was run through FACES and matched to Dillon's name. Despite the lack of corroborating evidence, the investigating officer requested a search of license plate readers for two vehicles registered to Dillon, which yielded no results. Six months later, the officer submitted a warrant for Dillon's arrest, leading to his detention in December 2023. The State Attorney's Office dropped all charges a few weeks later, but the officer was promoted by the end of the year.
FACES, which has been in operation since 2001, holds tens of millions of Florida mug shots and driver's license photos and is one of the oldest police face-recognition systems in the U.S. At its peak in 2021, it was accessible to over 260 agencies, including the FBI and ICE. The system has operated with minimal oversight, as a 2016 study found that Pinellas County Sheriff's Office conducted no audits of how the database was searched and required no reasonable suspicion to run a query. The ACLU says Dillon's case is one of at least 15 known wrongful arrests linked to face-recognition technology in the U.S.
Source: wired
