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Jalil Richardson of North Carolina is free after spending over 50 days in jail after being wrongfully arrested for a crime he did not commit.
According to Action News Jax, Richardson was initially accused of stealing a vehicle in Jacksonville, Florida, after police fed surveillance video from a private business into their AI-integrated facial recognition system.
The system then identified Richardson with what it said was an 85 percent facial recognition match, the Florida attorney’s office told Jax. Paired with two “eyewitness” accounts, it was enough to establish probable cause against Richardson, even though he’d been clocked into his job hundreds of miles away when the crime took place.
After being arrested and made to spend nearly two months in custody, Richardson and his lawyers were finally able to establish his alibi in court, forcing prosecutors to drop the case — an infuriating miscarriage of justice, and quite possibly a sign of things to come as cops across the country embrace flawed facial recognition systems as a shortcut to investigating crimes.
“There was no proper investigation done to even reach out to me or to see if I was even in Florida,” Richardson told Jax. “And I sat in there for over 50 days in the most worst jail ever.”
Wrongful arrests based on AI facial recognition software are becoming something of a pattern with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. Their first victim was Robert Dillon, a “93 percent match” who was wrongfully accused of attempting to lure and kidnap a 12-year-old child.
Like Richardson, Dillon was a world away at the time — a five hour drive on the other side of the state.
According to privacy litigation director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation Adam Schwartz, it’s the 14th known case of a wrongful arrest due to facial recognition software.
“The technology is simply too dangerous for law enforcement to be using at all,” Schwartz told Jax. “More than a dozen innocent people have been arrested by police because of errors with face recognition. These errors, majority, are people of color. The largest group of them is Black people.”
Though the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office rejects “any assumption that the technology discriminates against any specific skin tones,” evidence to the contrary is increasingly difficult to deny. Though the Sheriff’s office refuses to take any responsibility, their wrongful arrest has all but destroyed Richardson’s previous life.
On top of losing his job — no working class person can miss two months and hope to stay on the payroll — Richardson told Jax he lost his home, as well as custody of two of his kids.
“I’m not sure how I’m gonna bounce back from this one, you know,” he told reporters. “It’s a lot. I’m just taking it one day at a time.”
More on facial recognition: AI Mistake Throws Innocent Grandmother in Jail for Nearly Six Months
I’m a tech and labor correspondent for Futurism, where my beat includes the role of emerging technologies in governance, surveillance, and labor.
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