Facial recognition error led to pregnant Black woman’s arrest in Detroit

Porcha Woodruff is the sixth individual to claim that facial recognition technology led to false accusations against them. Her case marks the third instance involving Detroit’s police.

An automated facial recognition search error led to the wrongful arrest of a pregnant Black woman in Detroit.

Porcha Woodruff, a 32-year-old licensed aesthetician and nursing school student, recalled getting her two daughters ready for school when six police officers arrived at her home last February to take her into custody for robbery and carjacking, according to The New York Times.

While she was eight months pregnant, police took a handcuffed Woodruff to the Detroit Detention Center, where she was detained for 11 hours, interrogated about a crime she maintained she had no knowledge of, and had her iPhone seized for a search for evidence.

“I was having contractions in the holding cell. My back was sending me sharp pains. I was having spasms. I think I was probably having a panic attack,” said Woodruff, The Times reported. “I was hurting, sitting on those concrete benches.”

Woodruff was released on a $100,000 personal bail following her court appearance on charges of robbery and carjacking. She claimed in an interview that she went right to the hospital, where she was given two bags of intravenous fluids for dehydration. The Wayne County prosecutor dismissed the case against her a month later.

On Thursday, Woodruff filed a wrongful arrest lawsuit against Detroit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.

The city is now at the center of three lawsuits alleging unjust arrests caused by facial recognition technology.

Detroit Police Chief James E. White stated that the allegations made in the complaint “are very concerning” and that the department is taking the situation seriously.

Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy called the arrest warrant in Woodruff’s case “appropriate based upon the facts.”

A 25-year-old man contacted the Detroit police from a liquor store on a Sunday night, more than two weeks before officers arrived at Woodruff’s door, to report that he had been robbed at gunpoint.

The robbery victim informed police that he had picked up a woman earlier in the day from the street. He claimed they had been drinking together in his car at a BP gas station and a liquor store parking lot, where they also had sex. 

A man allegedly waited with a firearm to meet the victim when he dropped the woman off 10 minutes away. He grabbed the victim’s phone and wallet and escaped in his Chevy Malibu.

Days later, the police detained the driver of the stolen car. At the same BP station, a woman who matched the victim’s description of his robber dropped off his phone, according to the police report.

After receiving the surveillance footage from the BP station, a detective with the police department’s commercial auto theft unit requested that a crime analyst perform a facial recognition search on the woman.

City records state that the police employ DataWorks Plus, a facial recognition company, to compare unfamiliar faces to a database of criminal mug pictures. The algorithm provides matches, ranked by how likely they are to be the same person, and the department uses this information to make decisions. 

The crime analyst provided Woodruff’s identity to the investigator based on a match to a mugshot taken in 2015 after she was arrested for driving with an expired license.

According to the police report, the victim viewed a “six-pack photo lineup” — a set of six Black women’s mugshots — five days after the carjacking. He mistook Woodruff for the woman he had been involved with.

Gary Wells, a psychology professor who has researched the accuracy of eyewitness identifications, said using face recognition software in conjunction with eyewitness identification should not be the basis for criminal charges. Even if the person has no criminal intent, an eyewitness asked to perform the same comparison will likely make the same error as the machine.

Woodruff is the sixth individual to claim that facial recognition technology, employed by police to match an unknown offender’s face to a photo in a database, led to false accusations against them. All six victims were Black, and Woodruff is the first woman to describe having experienced it.

It is the third instance involving the Detroit Police Department, which, according to weekly reports about the use of the technology provided by the police to Detroit’s Board of Police Commissioners, a civilian oversight body, conducts 125 facial recognition searches on Black men annually. The technology’s detractors claim that these incidents highlight its flaws and dangers to innocent people.

Woodruff said she experienced stress throughout the remainder of her pregnancy. She added that her daughters had suffered trauma and that she felt humiliated about getting detained in front of her neighbors. They mock her infant son by saying he was “in jail before he was even born.”

She was so far along in her pregnancy, which made the experience much more challenging, but Woodruff said she believes it helped officials conclude that she did not commit the crime, as the carjacking suspect did not appear pregnant.

“It’s scary. I’m worried. Someone always looks like someone else,” said Woodruff’s attorney Ivan L. Land, The Times reported. “Facial recognition is just an investigative tool. If you get a hit, do your job and go further. Knock on her door.”

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