In August 2023, The New York Times published a report revealing that the Police Department of the City of Detroit in the United States is facing three lawsuits for wrongful arrests based on the use of facial recognition technology.

According to the report, the Detroit Police Department conducts, on average, 125 facial recognition searches a year, primarily targeting black men. However, the article highlights the most recent incident involving Porcha Woodruff, who was arrested for robbery and carjacking while she was 8 months pregnant. Her case was dismissed after a month, making her the third person to report being falsely accused of a crime due to facial recognition technology used by the Detroit Police Department to match an unknown offender’s face with a photo in a database. She is also the first woman known to be wrongfully accused based on this technology.

Furthermore, the report exposes that the Detroit Police Department uses DataWorks Plus facial recognition technology to compare unknown faces against a database of criminal mug shots. The system returns matches ranked by likelihood of being the same person, which are then reviewed by a human analyst responsible for deciding if any of the matches are potential suspects. In Ms. Woodruff's case, the crime analyst gave the investigator in charge her name based on a match to a 2015 mug shot. Subsequently, the detective assigned to the case asked the victim to look at the mug shots of six Black women. Ms. Woodruff’s photo was among them; the victim identified Ms. Woodruff, forming the basis for her arrest, as stated in a police report accessible to the New York Times.

The report includes insights from experts and civil society groups. One insight comes from Phil Mayor, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Michigan, who is representing a Detroit man who was wrongfully arrested based on a faulty facial recognition match, emphasized that this practice is extremely dangerous and has led to multiple false arrests.

The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre invited DataWorks Plus to respond to the concerns raised regarding the utilization of its facial recognition technology by the Detroit Police Department in violating the rights of individuals. The company did not respond.