Facial Recognition Pitches In To Help Cops Arrest A Maryland Man For A Crime He Didn’t Commit

Facial recognition tech needs more work. It's not great. Even when it's good, it's still pretty bad. While it performs well when identifying people not often considered to be criminal suspects (middle-aged white men), it's far less accurate when identifying everyone else (minorities, women).

Cops don't often see what the problem is. Their job usually involves harassing/arresting minorities, so anything that lends itself to business as usual is considered capable and competent.

This tech is now law enforcement mainstream. And it's doing what critics said it would do: resulting in bogus arrests predicated on nothing more than digital conclusions drawn by underperforming tech.

What's been seen elsewhere in the nation has now been observed in Maryland. According to this report by Khari Johnson for Wired, facial recognition tech has played an integral part in another wrongful arrest of an innocent person.

Alonzo Sawyer was arrested for an assault and theft he didn't commit. The software said his face matched the CCTV footage. But focusing on Sawyer's face ignored everything else about the suspect captured on video. Fortunately for Alonzo, his wife (Carronne Sawyer) went to bat for him after he was arrested.

Carronne drew attention to details in photos on her phone taken recently by her daughter. Her husband is taller than the suspect in the video, she explained, and has facial hair and gaps between his teeth. His right foot slews out when he walks, something she did not see in video footage of the attack.

I said my husband is 54 years old. This guy looks like he could be our son," Carronne says.

All of these differences were ignored by the tech and the person operating it, the Maryland Transit Administration Police's intelligence analyst." Both the tech and the human backstop ignored obvious discrepancies, like the fact that Alonzo Sawyer was seven inches taller and 20 years older than the second person the MTA eventually arrested, Deon Ballard.

Thanks to this failure, Maryland state senator, Charles Syndor, is, once again, seeking to block facial recognition tech use by government agencies. His first attempt, mounted in 2021, failed to go anywhere. With a wrongful arrest now on the record, Senator Syndor figures this is the best time to push legislation seeking to regulate law enforcement use of unproven (and unregulated) tech.

If passed, the legislation will do more than curtail MTA's careless wielding of the powerful, but inaccurate, tech. The Baltimore PD is a fan of facial recognition and wholeheartedly embraces its arrival. According to public defender Deborah Levi, public records show the Baltimore PD ran more than 800 facial recognition searches in 2022 alone - a twice-a-day occurrence that doesn't appear to have resulted in more meaningful arrests. Then again, it also didn't result in more bogus arrests, which is the sort of thing that can be considered a win, even if it just means the faulty tech wasn't abused.

Until cops are willing to be honest and open about this tech, they shouldn't be trusted with it. And no cop agency should be allowed to use nothing more than a purported match to obtain arrest warrants or stop citizens going about their daily business. The tech is too raw to trust. And if cops think it actually works as well as advertised, it's only because they want their preexisting biases to be confirmed.