NYT, Dec. 30, 2020
Another Arrest, and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match
By Kashmir Hill
In February 2019, Nijeer Parks was accused of shoplifting candy and
trying to hit a police officer with a car at a Hampton Inn in
Woodbridge, N.J. The police had identified him using facial recognition
software, even though he was 30 miles away at the time of the incident.
Mr. Parks spent 10 days in jail and paid around $5,000 to defend
himself. In November 2019, the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.
Mr. Parks, 33, is now suing the police, the prosecutor and the City of
Woodbridge for false arrest, false imprisonment and violation of his
civil rights.
He is the third person known to be falsely arrested based on a bad
facial recognition match. In all three cases, the people mistakenly
identified by the technology have been Black men.
Facial recognition technology is known to have flaws. In 2019, a
national study of over 100 facial recognition algorithms found that they
did not work as well on Black and Asian faces. Two other Black men —
Robert Williams and Michael Oliver, who both live in the Detroit area —
were also arrested for crimes they did not commit based on bad facial
recognition matches. Like Mr. Parks, Mr. Oliver sued over the wrongful
arrest.
Nathan Freed Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties
Union who believes that the police should stop using face recognition
technology, said the three cases demonstrated “how this technology
disproportionately harms the Black community.”
“Multiple people have now come forward about being wrongfully arrested
because of this flawed and privacy-invading surveillance technology,”
Mr. Wessler said. He worries that there have been other arrests and even
mistaken convictions that have not been uncovered.
Law enforcement often defends the use of facial recognition, despite its
flaws, by saying it is used only as a clue in a case and will not lead
directly to an arrest. But Mr. Parks’s experience is another example of
an arrest based almost solely on a suggested match by the technology.
The Crime
On a Saturday in January 2019, two police officers showed up at the
Hampton Inn in Woodbridge after receiving a report about a man stealing
snacks from the gift shop.
The alleged shoplifter — a Black man, nearly 6 feet tall, wearing a
black jacket — was visiting a Hertz office in the hotel lobby, trying to
get the rental agreement for a gray Dodge Challenger extended. The
officers confronted him, and he apologized, according to the police
report. He said he would pay for the snacks and gave the officers a
Tennessee driver’s license.
When the officers checked the license, they discovered it was
fraudulent. According to a police report, one of the officers spotted a
“big bag of suspected marijuana” in the man’s pocket. They tried to
handcuff him. That was when the man ran, losing a shoe on the way to his
rental car, police said.
As he drove off, the man hit a parked police car and a column in front
of the hotel, the police said. One of the officers said he had to jump
out of the way to avoid being hit. The rental car was later found
abandoned in a parking lot a mile away.
The Match
A detective in the Woodbridge Police Department sent the photo from the
fake driver’s license to state agencies that had access to face
recognition technology, according to a police report.
The next day, state investigators said they had a facial recognition
match: Nijeer Parks, who lived in Paterson, N.J., 30 miles away, and
worked at a grocery store. The detective compared Mr. Parks’s New Jersey
state ID with the fake Tennessee driver’s license and agreed it was the
same person. After a Hertz employee confirmed that the license photo was
of the shoplifter, the police issued a warrant for Mr. Parks’s arrest.
“I don’t think he looks like me,” Mr. Parks said. “The only thing we
have in common is the beard.”
Mr. Parks’s mistaken arrest was first reported by NJ Advance Media,
which said the facial recognition app Clearview AI had been used in the
case, based on a claim in Mr. Parks’s lawsuit. His lawyer, Daniel
Sexton, said he had inferred that Clearview AI was used, given media
reports about facial recognition in New Jersey, but now believes he was
mistaken.
Clearview AI is a facial recognition tool that uses billions of photos
scraped from the public web, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
Clearview AI’s founder, Hoan Ton-That, said officers affiliated with the
state agencies where information was analyzed in the case, known as
fusion centers, were not using his company’s app at that time.
According to the police report, the match in this case was to a license
photo, which would reside in a government database, to which Clearview
AI does not have access. The law enforcement involved in making the
match — the New York State Intelligence Center, New Jersey’s Regional
Operations Intelligence Center and two state investigators — did not
respond to inquiries about which facial recognition system was used.
In January, after a New York Times article about Clearview AI, New
Jersey’s attorney general, Gurbir S. Grewal, put a moratorium on
Clearview’s use by the police and announced an investigation into “this
product or products like it.” A spokesman for the attorney general’s
office said that New Jersey’s Division of Criminal Justice was still
evaluating the use of facial recognition products in the state, and that
the development of a policy governing their use was ongoing.
‘I Was Afraid’
After his arrest, Mr. Parks was held for 10 days at the Middlesex County
Corrections Center. New Jersey’s no-bail system uses an algorithm that
evaluates the defendant’s risk rather than money to determine whether a
defendant can be released before trial.
A decade ago, Mr. Parks was arrested twice and incarcerated for selling
drugs. He was released in 2016. The public safety assessment score he
received, which would have taken his past convictions into account, was
high enough that he was not released after his first hearing. His mother
and fiancée hired an attorney, who was able to get him out of jail and
into a pretrial monitoring program.
His history with the criminal justice system is what made this incident
so scary, he said, because this would have been his third felony,
meaning he was at risk of a long sentence. When the prosecutor offered a
plea deal, he almost took it even though he was innocent.
“I sat down with my family and discussed it,” Mr. Parks said. “I was
afraid to go to trial. I knew I would get 10 years if I lost.”
Mr. Parks was able to get proof from Western Union that he had been
sending money at a pharmacy in Haledon, N.J., when the incident
happened. At his last court hearing, he told the judge that he was
willing to go to trial to defend himself. But a few months later, his
case was dismissed.
Robert Hubner, the chief of the Woodbridge Police Department, declined
to comment on the case because of the pending lawsuit, but said his
department had not been served the complaint. The Middlesex County
prosecutor’s office also declined to comment.
Mr. Parks’s lawsuit over the wrongful arrest does not yet ask for damages.
“I was locked up for no reason,” Mr. Parks said. “I’ve seen it happen to
other people. I’ve seen it on the news. I just never thought it would
happen to me. It was a very scary ordeal.”
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