Answer: Could the use of facial recognition software by police introduce gender or racial bias in their operations?
For context, this is a question I answered on Quora
It already has and the record of false positives that give police an excuse to make false arrests of people who did not commit the crime they are arrested for shows the false positive match rate is several orders of magnitude higher for darker skin, specifically black people.
The 2019 National Institute of Standards and Technology facial recognition vendor test of demographic effects found that false positive matches varied by factors of 10 to 100 across demographics with the highest rate among West and East African faces as well as East Asian among some algorithms and the lowest among European faces. Mind you this was among the highest quality application photos used to test nearly 200 algorithms. Among images submitted by domestic law enforcement i.e. mugshots the same algorithms demonstrated the highest false positive rate among American Indians, black Americans and asian American faces with a higher false positive rate for women.
The past 7 years have only corroborated these findings. Among confirmed cases of false arrests made after FRT matched an innocent person’s face with the suspect, the vast majority of those arrested were black.
In January 2019, a man in New Jersey was arrested by Woodbridge Police for shoplifting in a city he had never been to because FRT matched him to the picture on the actual suspect’s fake ID that he had left at the scene of the crime. He was denied bail and held in a county jail for 10 days, where he was kept in solitary confinement, solely on the basis of a FRT false positive match from a suspect’s fake ID. Even after he was released, he lost his job and police continued to gangstalk him for a year after his false arrest.
Source: Law and Crime
In the same year, Detroit police falsely arrested Michael Oliver for a theft he did not commit based on an FRT match that did not even have the same head shape as him.
Source: Metrotimes
In January 2020, Robert Williams was arrested by Detroit police for a store robbery he didn’t commit and held in a detention center for 30 hours.
Source: ABC News
In the summer of 2022, Randal Reid was arrested for credit fraud in Jefferson Parish, LA, a place he had not been to, after the Jefferson Parish Sheriff Office used FRT to match the suspect from surveillance video to him. He spent 6 days in a Georgia county jail before his family was able to hire an attorney in Louisiana to exonerate him.
Source: Associated Press
That same year, Alonzo Swayer was falsely arrested for committing assault on a Baltimore bus driver and stealing his phone, despite not riding the bus, after FRT matched him to the suspect on CCTV footage. The actual suspect was younger, shorter, and had no facial hair unlike Alonzo. Despite not matching, the physical appearance of the suspect, aside from also being black, Alonzo was jailed for 9 days with no other corroborating evidence to support his arrest and detention.
Source:Levelman
Porcha Woodruff was arrested by Detroit police in 2023 for a carjacking she did not commit while 8 months pregnant after FRT matched her to the suspect based on an old ID she had a younger age.
Source: Associated Press
More recently Trevis William was arrested by NYPD last year for a sex crime (indecent exposure) he didn’t commit after FRT matched him to another black man that was 8 inches shorter and 70 lbs lighter. NYPD falsely arrested him and held in jail for 2 days despite not matching the physical description given by the victim and his cell site location data putting him miles away from the scene of the crime when it occurred.
Source: ABC 7 News
Chris Gatlin spent 17 months in jail for an assault on the St. Louis metrolink he did not commit because an FRT program matched him to the face of one of the suspects in a grainy surveillance video and St. Louis police prodded the victim, who couldn’t remember the faces of his assailants, to pick him in a line up. St. Louis police had no corroborating evidence to confirm the false positive and still destroyed this man’s life.
Source: Fox 2 News
To date the only white person to be falsely arrested for an FRT false positive match is Jason Vernau in Miami, who was falsely arrested for cashing a fraudulent check because the algorithm matched his face to that of the suspect who cashed the fraudulent check on the same day and at the same back he went to.