Randal Quran Reid is the latest plaintiff to take legal action against a police department and not for the classic, police brutality case you’d think. Reid is accusing the cops of falsely identifying him as a crime suspect based off of facial recognition technology. He’s not the only one either.
Reid, 29, filed a lawsuit in Atlanta federal court accusing authorities from Jefferson Parish, Louisiana of using a facial recognition tool to falsely arrest him for stealing a credit card. According to his lawsuit, he was in Georgia at the time of the theft. The six days he spent in jail cost him days at work, his car getting towed and falling ill because of the food he was given until they realized they had the wrong guy, per The Associated Press.
The report says Reid is one of five Black plaintiffs who sued the police in the last few years over this very issue. Reid’s filing also comes as the use of artificial intelligence has come under scrutiny for the ethics behind how and when it should be used. In a study by The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the federal government found that facial recognition algorithms perform poorly when analyzing the faces of people of color. The highest rates of error in the research were found among the faces of Black women.
Read more from the ACLU:
These error-prone, racially biased algorithms can have devastating impacts for people of color. For example, many police departments use face recognition technology to identify suspects and make arrests. One false match can lead to a wrongful arrest, a lengthy detention, and even deadly police violence.
That could explain why Ms. Porcha Woodruff was wrongfully arrested at her home for an alleged carjacking back in February, per Michigan Radio. She is one of three Black people in Michigan who took legal action on the same issue as Mr. Reid and one of six who have been arrested in the state thanks to the police facial recognition doohickeys.
In Reid’s suit, he is alleging false arrest, malicious prosecution and negligence. He also claimed the surveillance footage and AI-identification was the only thing the cops used to make a match to who they were looking for. For Reid’s attorney, that raises a number of problems beyond just the arrest.
“The use of this technology by law enforcement, even if standards and protocols are in place, has grave civil liberty and privacy concerns. And that’s to say nothing about the reliability of the technology itself,” said Cochran Firm senior attorney via AP News.
Police officers already have a track record of arresting Black folks at a higher rate than white folks. Letting a robot, with built-in racial bias, participate in identifying the suspects is just messy.