‘Thousands of Dollars for Something I Didn’t Do’ 31 March 2023

Because of a bad facial recognition match and other hidden technology, Randal Reid spent nearly a week in jail, falsely accused of stealing purses in a state he said he had never even visited...Mr. Reid [in Georgia] bore a resemblance to a suspect who had been recorded by a surveillance camera [in Louisiana]. The case eventually fell apart and the warrants were recalled, but only after Mr. Reid spent six days in jail and missed a week of work.

“Imagine you’re living your life and somewhere far away says you committed a crime,” Mr. Reid said. “And you know you’ve never been there.”

Mr. Reid’s wrongful arrest appears to be the result of a cascade of technologies — beginning with a bad facial recognition match — that are intended to make policing more effective and efficient but can also make it far too easy to apprehend the wrong person for a crime. None of the technologies are mentioned in official documents, and Mr. Reid was not told exactly why he had been arrested, a typical but troubling practice, according to legal experts and public defenders.

“In a democratic society, we should know what tools are being used to police us,” said Jennifer Granick, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union...

...A person with direct knowledge of the investigation confirmed to The New York Times that facial recognition technology had been used to identify Mr. Reid. Yet none of the documents used to arrest him disclosed that.

The [Jefferson Parish] Sheriff’s Office has a contract with one facial recognition vendor: Clearview AI, which it pays $25,000 a year. According to documents obtained by The Times in a public records request, the department first signed a contract with Clearview in 2019.

Clearview scraped billions of photos from the public web, including social media sites, to create a face-based search engine now used by law enforcement agencies. Mr. Reid has many public photos on the web linked to his name, including on LinkedIn and Facebook. The public information office for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office did not respond to requests for comment about the use of Clearview AI.

The company’s chief executive, Hoan Ton-That, said an arrest should not be based on a facial recognition search alone.

“Even if Clearview AI came up with the initial result, that is the beginning of the investigation by law enforcement to determine, based on other factors, whether the correct person has been identified,” he said. “More than one million searches have been conducted using Clearview AI. One false arrest is one too many, and we have tremendous empathy for the person who was wrongfully accused.”...