Florida man’s facial recognition match not probable cause for wrongful arrest

A man in Florida was wrongfully arrested last year after a facial recognition system used by the police flagged him as a possible suspect.

Robert Dillon was arrested in August of 2024 at his residence for attempting to lure a 12-year-old girl in Jacksonville Beach, some 300 miles away. Jacksonville Beach PD turned to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office for help, and JSO identified the 51-year-old man by comparing images from surveillance footage captured at the scene. After running it through facial recognition, the system returned a 93 percent match. He was arrested nine months after the incident.

Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office uses the Face Analysis Comparison & Examination System (FACES), which runs Idemia algorithms and is operated by Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, according to EFF.

The suspect, however, was released, with the State Attorney’s Office indicating that no charges were filed and that the arrest would be erased from his record.

The incident has once again highlighted the issue of false arrests caused by facial recognition in the U.S. According to Nate Freed-Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, wrongful arrests caused by facial recognition are more common than thought, especially among the Black population (though Dillon is white).

The attorney was part of a team representing Robert Williams, a Detroit man who was handcuffed in front of his family in 2020 after facial recognition misidentified him as a suspect in a federal larceny case.

“Police are not allowed under the Constitution to arrest somebody without probable cause,” Freed-Wessler told local news outlet Action News Jax. “And this technology expressly cannot provide probable cause.” Freed-Wessler also calls facial recognition “glitchy” and “so unreliable.”

Dillon was previously correctly identified as a suspect with facial recognition, Gulf Coast News reports.

The police have pushed back against the claim that facial recognition was the only reason for the arrest. Dillon’s photograph was also shown to two witnesses, who both identified him as the suspect they had seen in November 2023 among a group of similar photos.

“If you came to me with a facial recognition hit and that was your probable cause, I would probably kick you out of my office because that’s not how it works,” Jacksonville Sheriff TK Waters told the news outlet.

Photo lineups are generally considered to be sufficient to establish probable cause only in conjunction with other evidence.

According to the report, Dillon plans to join the growing number of Americans suing the police for their use of facial recognition.

In 2024, Williams won a $300,000 settlement from Detroit City while the state of Michigan adopted the U.S.’s strongest policy governing police use of facial recognition. Last month, a Louisiana police department agreed to pay $200,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by a man who was wrongly jailed after being misidentified by facial recognition.

Article Topics

biometric matching  |  biometrics  |  Face Analysis Comparison & Examination System (FACES)  |  facial recognition  |  false arrest  |  Florida  |  Pinellas County Sheriff's Office  |  police