ACLU Sues After Facial Recognition Falsely Identifies Florida Man As a Child Abductor (reason.com)
- Reference: 0183753358
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/06/11/1736213/aclu-sues-after-facial-recognition-falsely-identifies-florida-man-as-a-child-abductor
- Source link: https://reason.com/2026/06/11/aclu-sues-after-facial-recognition-falsely-identifies-florida-man-as-a-child-abductor/
> Police arrested a man in Florida for attempted child abduction in a town he had never visited, and the only evidence linking him to the crime was an AI facial recognition hit. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he is [2]now suing the officers and agencies who put him through it . [...] According to a police report, facial recognition software concluded with 93 percent confidence that the suspect was Robert Dillon. [...]
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> The ACLU is now [3]suing the city of Jacksonville Beach, as well as the individual police officers and officials involved in the case. According to the [4]lawsuit (PDF), the responding officer viewed security camera footage of the suspect but didn't take a copy; instead, he took pictures of the screen with his cell phone. "In the photos, the suspect image is low resolution, and the suspect's face is partially shadowed and off-axis," the lawsuit claims. When an investigator queried the facial recognition system, it was with the officer's grainy secondhand cell phone photos. [...]
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> But as the ACLU notes, facial recognition's accuracy "depends significantly on the quality of the probe image. Lower-quality images contain less interpretable facial data, degrading the system's ability to produce a reliable template." At the very least, it requires a much better source image. Besides, no such investigative tool should form the sole basis for an arrest warrant. "If you came to me with a facial recognition hit and that was your probable cause, I would probably kick you out of my office because that's not how it works," Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters [5]told local news . (Waters is among those being sued in the ACLU lawsuit, because it was an investigator from the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office who ran the grainy photo through facial recognition and advised O'Connell it was a "93% match" to Dillon.)
[1] https://slashdot.org/~fjo3
[2] https://reason.com/2026/06/11/aclu-sues-after-facial-recognition-falsely-identifies-florida-man-as-a-child-abductor/
[3] https://www.aclu.org/cases/dillon-v-city-of-jacksonville-beach
[4] https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2026/06/Dillon-v-City-of-Jacksonville-Beach-Complaint-1.pdf
[5] https://www.actionnewsjax.com/news/local/ai-wrong-guy-investigating-use-dangers-artificial-intelligence-jacksonville-policing/BJLBUO2N5BGTDDPXT7FLF22ZKM/
If you've done nothing wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
...you've got nothing to fear. I guess that doesn't hold true any longer. Truth is it was never true.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It was always just a sound bite from those who assumed themselves safe, blissfully unaware of Richelieu's quote.
No one's suing because of what the computer said, it's perfectly fine to automate flagging for human followup.
It's fucked up to automate execution . And if the human followup is just "the computer said" clowns you have not added a second stage.
Humans will always gravitate to the laziest available route so unless the followup is forcibly built in you have not added any judgement or evaluation or rev
Re: (Score:2)
Also try not to get your image into the image recognition software's database.
Pictures of pictures (Score:2)
Because it was a smartphone image of some other screen, it was probably riddled with [1]Moire patterns [wikipedia.org], further contaminating it for the facial recognition.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Moir%C3%A9_pattern&oldid=1357204367#Television_screens_and_photographs
Wheres the fiscal outrage (Score:2)
Florida is a pretty red state and here they are wasting tax dollars all over the place. Tax money wasted on the facial recognition tech. Tax money wasted on pursuing and processing a guy who had nothing to do with it and now more tax money wasted on having to pay this guy out. If this was CA I bet there would be nonstop Fox News and podcast slop about it.
Re: (Score:1)
The entire state of Florida is a grift, built by corrupt people for corrupt people.
Everything in the state is geared to fuck regular people over at every turn and bend in the road. It's literally a huge grift made legal by calling it a "state", but other than that it's the equivalent of a 65,758 square mile used car lot filled with voracious con men.
Dillon! (Score:2)
You son of a bitch. Gratuitous close up of biceps
Nip this in the bud (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope this guy gets a good 7-8 figure settlement out of the people involved in this, and it leads other agencies to pause a bit before [1]more people's lives are upended [valleynewslive.com] by lazy police departments. These systems are infallible, people using them as such need to feel the pain.
[1] https://www.valleynewslive.com/2026/03/24/fargo-police-chief-admits-errors-ai-arrest-case-issues-new-facial-recognition-policy/
Re: (Score:2)
> These systems are infallible
These systems are *NOT* infallible... my bad.
Re: (Score:1)
My sympathies. I, too, hate when words don't follow the usual flammable/inflammable pattern.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. My first thought was "this guy gets all the luck".
Re: (Score:2)
The accusation alone can ruin somebody'd life.
Re: (Score:1)
Correction: "somebody's".
Re: (Score:3)
100%. The lady in the article I linked spent a number of MONTHS incarcerated. I can't even imagine.