A Detroit woman who was falsely arrested for carjacking after police used faulty facial recognition technology is now suing the city, it was reported today.

This is the third case in Detroit in which an African-American has been falsely arrested after police used the highly controversial technology. Although all the cases expose a serious flaw in policing, this one is perhaps the most concerning. The woman, Porcha Woodruff, a mother of three and a licensed aesthetician and nursing school student, was eight months pregnant when cops showed up at her door in February to tell her she was being taken to the station on a charge of robbery and carjacking.

She was put in handcuffs and had to leave her children with her fiancé. “I was having contractions in the holding cell,” she told the New York Times. “My back was sending me sharp pains. I was having spasms. I think I was probably having a panic attack. I was hurting, sitting on those concrete benches.”

She was released on a $100,000 personal bond, after which she went straight to the hospital and was given intravenous fluids for dehydration. A month later, her case was dropped by the Wayne County prosecutor.

The macabre aspect of this arrest aside, facial recognition technology has time and again been called Orwellian and has been shown to make false positives, especially where black people are concerned. It’s the China-esque, hyper-surveillance part of the technology that has put leading tech companies under pressure, such as Amazon.com Inc., resulting in it scaling back its development of the technology over the years. It has also been banned in some cities.

Quite worryingly, though, it’s still widely used throughout the U.S. One of the companies currently selling it to police departments is Clearview AI Inc., an outfit that openly admits to scanning billions of images on social media. Its database was even breached not long ago. Clearview’s technology wasn’t used in this latest false match. Police in Detroit used surveillance video from the crime scene and ran images of people in that footage through facial recognition software created by DataWorks Plus, a biometrics systems firm based in Greenville, South Carolina.

In spite of the mountains of criticism, and the fact many countries, including the U.K., France, Italy and Australia, have banned such technology, right now DataWorks Plus tech is being used by police departments all over the U.S.

The media don’t often print the success stories, but Detroit police, who have said they are taking the false arrest “very seriously,” can’t possibly have applied thorough investigative tactics here. The only reason there was what looks like a dubious match was because Woodruff’s face was in the police database for once driving with an expired license.

In the past, police have said they only make arrests after a facial recognition match once a human has put in the detective work. That clearly can’t have happened in this case.

Phil Mayor, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, told The Times, “Shoddy technology makes shoddy investigations, and police assurances that they will conduct serious investigations do not ring true.”

Photo: Chris Curry/Unsplash