WIRED spoke with three men misidentified by facial recognition software about how their wrongful arrests changed their lives and the lives of people around them.
All three cases were eventually dropped, but in Parks’ case, that took almost a year, including 10 days in jail. The cases shared some commonalities. Oliver and Parks both had prior criminal records. Oliver and Williams were investigated by the same Detroit detective. All three men are fathers, and all three are Black. “It’s not a coincidence,” Parks says.
When Williams was arrested, he told Melissa, Julia, and his 4-year-old daughter Rosie that he’d be right back, but he was held by police for 30 hours. Julia still cries when she sees video of her dad being arrested on their front lawn. Her parents wonder how much the experience affected her. Defense attorneys and legal experts say some people wrongly accused by facial recognition agree to plea deals, suggesting wrongful arrests are more common than generally realized.
After his arrest, Parks didn’t tell many people, in part because of his prior record. “When you’re trying to do the right thing and change and do things differently and then something like that happens, people look at you like ‘Did you really do it?’” he says. In response to the lawsuit, the mayor of Woodbridge, director of the Woodbridge Police Department, and officers involved in the case denied allegations. A lawyer representing the Woodbridge County Corrections Department also denied allegations that Parks was subject to excessive force.
“I’ve got a son, I’ve got my family, I’ve got my own little house, paying all my bills, so once I got arrested and I lost my job, it was like everything fell, like everything went down the drain.”Nyenhuis said the detective investigating the case appeared to take shortcuts, including failing to question Oliver or review a video of the incident before his arrest.
Bussa, the detective in the Oliver case, also investigated the crime that led to Williams’ arrest. Lawyers representing Oliver and Williams say what happened to their clients reflects both an overreliance on facial recognition and poor investigative work. In court filings, Williams alleges that Bussa was told by a Shinola representative that the company doesn’t like its employees to appear in court and that a store manager refused to participate. So Bussa showed six photos to a security guard who wasn’t at the store on the day of the theft, the filings say, and the guard identified Williams. It’s not known whether the other photos were the product of facial recognition technology.
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