It’s no secret that law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology disproportionately affects Black people more often than it does any demographic group…and it’s been like that for years. But one city plans on making changes to how it uses the technology, thanks to the wrongful arrest of a Black man nearly six years ago.

Last month, along with agreeing to pay Robert Williams $300,000 in a settlement agreement, the City of Detroit agreed to revise how police use facial recognition to solve criminal cases, according to the Associated Press.

The Detroit police will now go back and look at all cases between 2017 and 2023 in which facial recognition was used and will notify a prosecutor if an arrest was made without evidence independent of the technology.

Robert Williams’ wrongful arrest

Williams was arrested in 2018 after someone stole watches from a store in the Detroit area. The only evidence Detroit Police had was an image from the store’s surveillance footage. Officers then sent the image to the Michigan State Police so they could run a search using face recognition technology, and what came up was an expired driver’s license photo of Williams, according to the lawsuit.

Although Williams said he was not the man in the image, Detroit police still used his photo to create a photo lineup and show it to a man who was not a witness to the crime and only saw the store’s surveillance footage.

Despite this, an officer, who has not been identified, still applied for an arrest warrant.

In April 2021, Williams filed a civil rights lawsuit against the detective, the city and the city’s chief of police with the help of the ACLU and the University of Michigan’s Law School’s Civil Rights Litigation Initiative.

More from the ACLU:

The lawsuit alleges that the detective, through his omissions in the warrant application, misled the magistrate judge, resulting in issuance of an arrest warrant without the required probable cause. It also alleges what discovery in Mr. Williams’ case and several more recent facial-recognition false arrests in Detroit have since made obvious: That the city lacked any policy for law enforcement use of face recognition technology at the time the technology was used in this case, and that Detroit failed to train its police officers on the dangers of misusing face recognition technology in their investigations.

Past examples of facial recognition affecting Black people

Even before Williams’ wrongful arrest, facial recognition technology had already been doing Black people dirty.

In 2018, 28 members of Congress, including six members of the Congressional Black Caucus, were falsely identified as suspects charged with a crime on Amazon’s facial recognition technology.

In December 2020, a Black man in New Jersey filed a lawsuit after he was wrongly identified as a suspect who shoplifted from a hotel gift shop. He spent 10 days in jail.

In July 2021, a Black girl was banned from a Michigan skating rink after facial recognition software misidentified her for a different Black girl who got in a brawl at the business on a prior date.

In August 2023, a pregnant Black woman was falsely identified and arrested as a carjacking thief in Detroit thanks to the technology.

By Ted Chisholm

When we elect leaders to represent us, we rightfully ask them to explain how their policies will provide a tangible benefit to our community. As a candidate for Milwaukee County Treasurer in the August 13 Democratic primary, I am frequently asked that question. I am always happy to respond because the County Treasurer’s Office can do much more to support a thriving community for all.

First, the County Treasurer can drive economic growth that actually benefits our communities, and not just well-heeled developers in downtown Milwaukee. The Treasurer is responsible for enforcing property tax delinquencies in eighteen of Milwaukee County’s nineteen municipalities – the City of Milwaukee has its own elected treasurer. That means that in Glendale, Brown Deer, Wauwatosa, Shorewood, West Allis, and communities across our county, the Treasurer can take action to foreclose on vacant and abandoned industrial and commercial sites whose owners have failed to pay property taxes in years.

All too often, vacant and abandoned properties languish for years, while Milwaukee County foots the tax bill to the municipality. This is a problem for our entire community, and the Treasurer’s Office must do more to acquire these properties, even if that means working with state and private-sector partners to identify, on the front end, funding that the county’s economic development staff can use to make the properties suitable for sale upon acquisition.

By acquiring vacant properties more rapidly, the Treasurer’s Office can help restore them to active use. Once a property is acquired by Milwaukee County through foreclosure by the Treasurer’s Office and the Office of Corporation Counsel, the property can be cleaned up, as is often required of old industrial sites and sold by the county’s Economic and Community Development Division. The sale of these properties will create new revenue for Milwaukee County, enabling greater investment in human services and infrastructure that benefit all Milwaukee County residents.

At the same time, in communities directly served by the Treasurer’s enforcement function, there is a need for greater housing equity and for the buildout of locally-owned businesses – including Black-owned businesses seeking to expand. When we look at growing communities like Brown Deer, Glendale, Oak Creek, and Franklin, we see a common pattern: the potential for business growth and investment in new markets.

At the same time, industrial and commercial prospects are not the only opportunities made available by the redevelopment of land obtained by the Treasurer’s Office. Milwaukee County needs more affordable housing, particularly in our suburban communities, that is truly accessible and welcoming to all members of our community. The Treasurer’s Office can help catalyze this critical form of development by working with municipal partners to acquire abandoned properties that could be redeveloped into opportunities for new housing, such as single-family homes, multi-unit complexes, or mixed-use residential developments with retail outlets on the ground floor.

I hope this summary helps illustrate how an engaged and effective Treasurer’s Office could provide better service to our community!