The Sir Jack Files, special edition: The Wrong Face

Detroit. January ninth, twenty twenty. Twenty-two minutes past five. A man pulls into his own driveway after a day at work.

His wife is at the door. His two little girls are watching. Seconds later, a police car pulls in behind him. Handcuffs.

He asks what for. The warrant says: larceny. His wife asks for a card, some way to reach him. An officer tells her: Officer: “Google it.”

His name is Robert Williams. And the witness against him was a machine. Rewind. October second, twenty eighteen.

A man walks into a Shinola store in downtown Detroit, and walks out with five watches. About thirty-eight hundred dollars. The cameras catch him, barely. Head down.

A red St. Louis Cardinals cap hiding his face. March twenty nineteen. A detective takes one blurry frame from that video and sends it for a facial recognition search.

Michigan State Police run it. The software, from a company called DataWorks Plus, offers a name: Robert Williams. It had matched an old, expired photo from his driver's licence. The report came back with a warning, in capital letters.

This document is not a positive identification. It is an investigative lead only, and is not probable cause to arrest. Here is where a lead became an accusation. In July, detectives showed six photos to a loss-prevention contractor working for Shinola.

She had not been in the store. She had only seen the same grainy video. She picked Robert. His lawyers would later call it a rigged lineup, built by a computer.

On that, a warrant was signed. Back to the driveway. He tells his five-year-old he'll see her soon. Then a crowded cell in the Detroit Detention Center.

Not enough mats, his lawsuit says, so he slept on concrete. Nobody tells him why he's there. The next day, two detectives slide a picture across the table: the man from the store. Robert picks it up and holds it next to his own face.

Robert: “That's not me at all. Y'all can't tell that?” One detective, he recalls, answers: Detective: “So I guess the computer got it wrong, too.” Still, it's hours more before he walks out on bond, into a rainy January night.

Thirty hours, in all. At home, the family portrait in the living room has been turned to face the wall. His older daughter did it, his lawsuit says, because the girls cried every time they saw it. Two weeks later, prosecutors drop the charges.

The county prosecutor apologizes. Detroit's police chief calls it shoddy investigative work, not a failure of the technology. But it happened again. February twenty twenty-three.

Porcha Woodruff, eight months pregnant, is arrested for a carjacking she didn't commit. Another facial recognition lead. Another lineup. In twenty twenty, Detroit's own police chief put it plainly: used by itself, he said, the technology would misidentify ninety-six percent of the time.

A federal study by NIST found many algorithms more likely to falsely match Black and Asian faces. June twenty-eighth, twenty twenty-four. After three years in federal court, Detroit settles. Three hundred thousand dollars, and new rules the ACLU calls the strongest in the nation.

No arrest on a face match alone. No photo lineup built straight from a match. Training. And an audit of cases going back to twenty seventeen.

Robert Williams got the rules. He didn't get what he wanted most: for the police to stop using it. Researchers at Georgetown estimated that one in two American adults is in a police face recognition network. Which means somewhere, right now, a machine has a picture of you.

A match is not a witness. It's a question. The rules decide who has to answer it. The Sir Jack Files.

Case closed.