Detroit woman sues city after false arrest due to faulty facial recognition technology

Our Take

WDRB News lays out a story that should terrify anyone who thinks "the algorithm flagged you" is a good enough reason to send police to your door. A pregnant woman getting her kids ready for school gets zip-tied and hauled off because facial recognition software made a match that wasn't real. No human seems to have stopped to ask whether the tech was right before acting on it as gospel.

This is the same pattern we see with automated license plate readers: a black-box system spits out a "hit," cops treat it as probable cause, and the burden of proving innocence falls on the person in handcuffs. Flock Safety and its facial-recognition cousins are sold to cities as neutral, error-free force multipliers. They're not. They're probabilistic guesses wrapped in a badge of authority, and the people who pay for the mistakes are disproportionately Black residents who've been flagged by these systems again and again in cities across the country.

Facial recognition and ALPR networks are two branches of the same tree — mass, dragnet surveillance that trades due process for convenience. If your city is quietly wiring itself up with this kind of infrastructure, check our camera map to see what's already watching you, and head to take-action for ways to push back before your neighbor becomes the next lawsuit.