Robert Dillon was arrested at his own home, in front of his wife, for a crime that happened 300 miles away, in a city he had never once visited.
Police in Jacksonville Beach, Florida said a facial recognition program returned a 93 percent match between Dillon's face and a blurry security camera photo, so instead of checking that number against the facts, they built their whole case around it. Dillon spent months fighting a charge that could have destroyed his life, all because a machine got it wrong and officers believed the machine over the evidence.
Sign the petition to demand Congress ban police from arresting anyone based on a facial recognition match alone, and require officers to tell courts and defendants whenever the technology played a role in an arrest.Dillon is not alone. Kimberlee Williams, a grandmother from Oklahoma, spent six months in jail after a facial recognition search wrongly flagged her as a bank fraud suspect operating in Maryland -- a state she had never even been to.
Kimberlee is at least the fourteenth person in the United States known to have been wrongfully arrested because police trusted a computer match over a real investigation.In case after case, officers ignored evidence that pointed away from the person the software flagged, including work records, alibis, and vehicle location data showing they were nowhere near the crime.
Facial recognition software is built to find faces that look similar, not to prove guilt. When police treat a computer match as if it were a confession, a tool meant to start an investigation becomes the entire case, and the burden of proving innocence falls on someone who did nothing wrong.
Some cities have already banned police from using this technology entirely, and Detroit's police department no longer lets officers seek an arrest warrant based on a facial recognition lead combined with a photo lineup alone. This is an amazing first step.
But without a national law, every other police department in the country is free to keep making the same mistake, and the next person the software gets wrong could be any one of us.Congress can -- and must -- stop this pattern before it destroys another innocent life.Congress must pass a law banning arrests based solely on facial recognition and requiring police to disclose whenever this technology is ever used to identify a suspect.
Sign the petition if you agree! 