AI misidentification results in wrongful arrest; man seeks justice
wsoctv.comorigin is geoblocking. https://archive.is/DtYSf
> He stated he was held in the Mecklenburg County Jail for one month.
> While he was incarcerated, Richardson lost his job and his home. He also said he lost custody of two of his children.
Alright. Time to ban AI in policing. It can't be used responsibly, so it can't be used at all.
Do you prefer human identification, like picking the suspect among a group lineup? More accurate I guess?
The article says the cops used "AI" to find a suspect then the victim identified them in a photo lineup. That provided the probable cause to get a judge to sign a warrant.
85% accurate is doing a lot of hiding LOL. Searching a multi-million-face gallery and even high per-comparison accuray turns into mostly false positive. THese systems are only ever defensible as an investigative lead, neve as probable cause.
> THese systems are only ever defensible as an investigative lead, neve as probable cause.
That's why the cops followed up with a photo lineup shown to the victim before applying for a warrant.
Which is stupid though because obviously it's just going to be someone that looks like the person they are after. The idea with a lineup is that you have some other sort of evidence, not based on how people look, and then have them identify the person. If you used a tool to find people that look a certain way and then put that person in a line up with other "non-85%" matches it's reasonable the respondent would pick that person.
> The idea with a lineup is that you have some other sort of evidence, not based on how people look, and then have them identify the person
No, that's not the idea with lineups; if that was it, you could just show one photo of a single suspect and ask "Is that them?" Which, as you know, has tremendous problems with accuracy of identifications.
Yes, but that's why you use the line up. You don't just show them random people that look like what they described.
It's like, the suspect was a white guy with brown hair in a blue car, and then you get all the white guys with brown hair and blue cars that were in the area and present a line up of them with similar looking people but not having blue cars and being in the area.
"followed up"...
he was extradited from 400 miles away in a different state, had never been to florida, and had timesheets from working at his job at the time.
how did that craziness even pull him into the lineup?
Honestly, at some point this kind of tool is going to find LOTS of similar people from a pool of 350,000,000
We need a new term for this, maybe likeness-fishing.
What does 85% accurate even mean?
To the average person it means: No matter what task you apply the tool to, that you will be right 85% of the time, and 85% is a solid B, a passing grade, so let's use it.
So in other words, if you show it 100 random people and ask who did it, it will tell you to arrest 15 people, with a 15% chance not a single one of them is guilty?
(assuming it will operate independently for every individual you show it)
That's great.
Of course, putting such a system on public cameras, scanning large amounts of people, is about as stupid as some of the biggest disasters in medicine (using a 98% effective drug on random people, regardless of whether it would help them or not. You REALLY want to check what happens if you're wrong before applying it to a large number of people)
This is exactly like that case from Fargo earlier this year. We got a new police chief after this, but she still hasn't been compensated and nobody got in trouble for it.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/03/18/fargo-polices-use-o...
This is horrifying. The prosecutor who sought an extradition based on an 85% accurate AI model should be disbarred.
I have bad news about the accuracy of almost all forensic science, especially fingerprints and dna
That's why we don't trust them alone or can demand tests from different sources. AI, however, gets sold as an ultimate cure. Just like anything computers touch, it is assumed infallible.
I have bad news about Prosecutorial Immunity. It is damn near impossible to punish a prosecutor for anything done in the line of work.
Kidnapping and false imprisonment charges seem reasonable.
Reasonable, yes, but they won't happen, because prosecutors never prosecute themselves.
"Reasonable" does not have a legal meaning. Or rather, it has hundreds of thousands of pages of legal meaning. Which means it means nothing.
> Richardson’s attorney showed time sheets proving he was at work 400 miles away from Florida when the stolen car was sold. Richardson said he has never been to Florida, and his attorney tried to present this evidence for months.
I continue to not understand why anyone finds it tolerable for the justice system to move so slowly. I don't want to make excuses for AI identification, but no identification process is perfect, it should not be possible that it takes months to clear up.
> I don't want to make excuses for AI identification, but no identification process is perfect, it should not be possible that it takes months to clear up.
Indeed you shouldn't make excuses. "{Sketchy component} is just one part of the process and is harmless in principle because we have other safeguards such as... nothing we care to subject to your scrutiny" is the prototypical excuse of a broken system:
> The office stated, “Facial recognition technology is used as one tool among many available to investigators. In this case, it was one tool, but certainly not the only tool, which lent to the probable cause determination that Mr. Richardson was the perpetrator of these crimes.”
The other tool appears to have been good ol' fashioned racism:
> Richardson alleged racial profiling played a role in his misidentification. “I want to say racial profiling. The guy said it was a guy with dreads and a big nose, and then they picked me out of a lineup of guys that look nothing like me,” Richardson said.
It's obvious what any sane society should do in this case, what actual safeguards would be. A sane society would have a social safety net so that being jailed for 3 months and subsequently released innocent wouldn't ruin your life. Not only did he get punished by having to spend 3 months in jail, he also now has to go and find housing, a job, and go through the civil court system, which is even slower, to ... still be made less than whole. I won't be surprised that the police argue and win with a qualified immunity defense.
To make matters worse, mugshots get people prejudiced from jobs regardless of an HNers ability to discern between a charge and a conviction.
True criminal justice, true innocence until proven guilty would have had his obligations to pay rent/mortgage/bills paused, his employer barred from firing him for missed work, and so on.
(I had to keep editing my post - I just want to say I think it's ridiculous that this dude had to be in jail FOR 3 MONTHS)
The first word of the article is "Jalil", the name of the person involved.
That is the answer to your question.
I don't blame him for a second for thinking that, but the Fargo woman this last happened to was white. There's something wrong with the procedures themselves.
I sent this to my lawyer friends who like to help so hopefully we can get some restitution for him
These clowns need to be taken for all the money they can
I don't understand why you would be downvoted. Is your comment raising a pitchfork? Yes. But sometimes when a person's life gets ruined, pitchforks deserve to come out.
> Richardson’s attorney showed time sheets proving he was at work 400 miles away from Florida when the stolen car was sold. Richardson said he has never been to Florida, and his attorney tried to present this evidence for months.
> Richardson alleged racial profiling played a role in his misidentification. “I want to say racial profiling. The guy said it was a guy with dreads and a big nose, and then they picked me out of a lineup of guys that look nothing like me,” Richardson said.
> While he was incarcerated [for two months], Richardson lost his job and his home. He also said he lost custody of two of his children.
Everyone: It's okay to get angry at injustice. Indeed it is the more noble reaction than to shrug and say, "Now let's be reasonable, I'm sure the institution that caused this will redress this."
People have made accounts just to downvote me. So I must be doing something right.
> People have made accounts just to downvote me.
How can you tell?
A greentext username with 10 minute old account, zero karma and 1 comment that comment being something negative in response usually
There was an example months ago but I don’t keep track of the specifics
Accounts with zero karma don’t have the ability to downvote comments.
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#downvo...
> After users reach 501 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment.
Ah good point, well they sign up to say nasty stuff at least
At first I thought this was a re-post of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48449513, but no, it seems this is becoming a trend.
Especially the "jailed for one month with no evidence" thing. Well, except for a lineup, which I've learned is about as legit as a lie-detector test, field sobriety test, or a drug-sniffing dog; tenuous at best and very easy to get a false positive.
We can call all these inaccurate methods The Injustice System. Next episode: The Dishonorable AI Judge.
Maddening.
This will happen more often in many domains, and it raises the general question of liability.
Should it be the AI company that created the model? The company that build the face recognition software using the model? The police department that decided to use the face recognition software?
I would assume the police department is the one legally liable, though they may turn around and sue the software company, and I guess the question is whether they can sue the frontier model company.
In this particular case false AI identification was only small part of generic fuckup. Choosing guy from line-up done in completely racially biased way, prosecutor office refusing proof of crime has been committed by someone else, etc. etc. The only way this ever going to be fixed is when our fucking overlords will be held personally responsible which is never.
This isn't just AI misidentification. This is also an eye witness picking him out of a lineup. This is really AI extending the reach of the already sketchy eye witness practice.
Racist technology and a racist plaintiff in two racist states. What could go wrong????
Three "racist" in a sentence is a bingo. Congratulations.
> already sketchy eye witness practice.
Frankly, eyewitness' testimony should be inadmissible in court. Why does it even count as evidence at all, and "direct" evidence at that? People can't be trusted to accurately remember things. Neither can technology be trusted to uncover the circumstance correctly. Perhaps we should just abolish the criminal system entirely; wrongful prosecution is a much bigger problem than complete lack of prosecution would ever be.
It sounds like a plot for this movie: Mercy [0]
I sincerely hope this man get seek redress for this disgusting miscarriage of justice.