Black man files lawsuit over misuse of AI facial recognition

Source: Serg Myshkovsky / Getty

Some of y’all are WAY too excited about “advancements” in technology. Have y’all never seen movies before???

Over the past few years as AI has become more popular in the public safety sphere, BOSSIP has reported on several instances where facial recognition tech has run amok and gotten innocent Black folks jammed up and today, we have another. According to ABCNews, a Black man in Atlanta has filed a lawsuit against police officers who arrested him with claims that warrants were out for his arrest. 29-year-old Randal Quran Reid was going to visit his mother near Atlanta when he was pulled over by Dekalb County officers. He was informed that he had warrants out of him in both Jefferson and East Baton Rouge Parishes in Louisiana.

“They told me that I had a warrant out of Jefferson Parish. I asked, ‘Where’s Jefferson Parish?’ because I had never heard of that county,” Reid told ABC News. “And then they told me it was in Louisiana. Then I was confused because I had never been to Louisiana.”

According to the lawsuit, Jefferson Parish officers used the AI tech to identify three men who potentially used stolen credit cards to buy $15,000 of designer purses.

“[The facial recognition technology] spit out three names: Quran plus two individuals,” Gary Andrews, Reid’s lawyer and senior attorney at The Cochran Firm in Atlanta, told ABC News. “It is our belief that the detective in this case took those names … and just sought arrest warrants without doing any other investigation, without doing anything else to determine whether or not Quran was actually the individual that was in the store video.”

Deputy Director of the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union Nate Freed Wessler says that every single state in America has police departments that use this secret technology without being transparent with the public. Wessler also says that every single false arrest on account of bad AI information has been Black or of African-American descent.

Randal Reid sat in a Dekalb County jail for SIX DAYS while his parents and lawyers scrambled desperately to clear his name by sending exculpatory information to JPSO. That company that supplies this tech to police departments is called Clearview AI, Inc. and their CEO Hoan Ton-That released a statement that attempts to distance his company from the shoddy police work of the JSPO:

“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…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.”