That appearances are deceptive was verified, and suffered, by Porcha Woodruff in the first person.
They arrested her in Detroit for her face, literally said, although she, who was stunned in the presence of her two daughters, insisted that “that’s not me.” That she was another.
The greedy policemen thought it was the usual excuse for criminals. They did not consider at any time that there could be an error in the application of facial recognition, despite the fact that it would not be the first time, especially in the case of black people with whom the deficiencies of this method are more than demonstrated. Racism is also technological. His matter has led to a complaint against the Detroit Police Department and the request that the use of facial recognition in investigations be prohibited.
Woodruff, 32, was preparing one morning last February to leave home and accompany his girls to school, but six uniformed men knocked on his door. The agents ordered him out of it. She was arrested for theft and car theft.
He says he told them: “Are you kidding me?” Her question was underlined by her reaching for her belly. She was eight months pregnant, she didn’t seem like she was in very good physical condition to go beating around.
It didn’t help. Not even a reasonable doubt was aroused. They handcuffed her in front of her home. The two daughters, ages six and twelve, burst into tears when they saw that this was serious. She asked them to wake up her fiancée, who was taking her to jail.
She was transferred to a Michigan City detention center. The eager policemen had the proof. The software found that an old photo of Woodruff, from eight years ago when she was arrested for driving on an expired license, matched the suspect’s picture of her. The victim, a 25-year-old man who was robbed at gunpoint, also pointed to that photo.
They kept her locked up for eleven hours. She was interrogated for a crime she knew nothing about. They seized her mobile phone to find evidence of her wrongdoing. During her stay in her cell, as she now recounts, she suffered from contractions, experienced severe pain in her back, spasms, probably a panic attack. This woman, a licensed beautician and nursing student, found that the discomfort increased while sitting on those benches.
After being charged and released on $100,000 bail, she immediately went to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with dehydration and injected with two bags of intravenous fluids, she says.
Two months later, the Wayne County prosecutor’s office dismissed the indictment against her for insufficient evidence.
According to The New York Times, Woodruff is the sixth person in the United States to report being falsely accused of a crime as a result of facial recognition technology police use to match an unknown criminal’s face to the images. of their databases.
All those affected are African-American and Woodruff is the first woman to whom something like this has happened.
In Detroit it rains it pours. This is the third case involving its police, who on average perform 125 facial recognitions per year. Virtually all of them involve black people, based on official data provided by that department’s oversight commission, a civilian group that monitors uniformed activity.
The complaint Woodruff filed this week is the third such complaint in this city. In his lawsuit, he insists on the trauma that seeing her mother handcuffed and detained entails for his children. “I have suffered emotional stress and I may suffer it in the future. I could have lost my son, ”she remarks in the text of his legal claim. And the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) demands that this technology that criminalizes African-Americans in particular be withdrawn. This organization emphasizes that the Detroit police continue to use it despite its flaws. They describe it as unreliable and totally discarded as the only proof. It becomes clear that Porcha Woodruff was pulled over in the face.
