A 32-year-old Detroit, Michigan, woman is taking legal action against the city after she was falsely accused of carjacking and robbery due to a facial recognition error.
Porcha Woodruff was eight months pregnant at the time of her arrest on Feb. 16, according to news reports. Now months later, she filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for Eastern Michigan with Detroit Police Detective LaShauntia Oliver, identified as a defendant in the suit, according to NBC News citing court documents.
Woodruff initially thought the several officers who appeared at her home were joking when they presented the arrest warrant, according to the report. She was getting her kids ready for school upon their arrival, telling the New York Post that she “was scared” and that there “was no sympathy” from law enforcement. The outlet reported that she was in jail for hours before she was released on a $100,000 bond and transported to a local hospital for medical treatment, where she was having contractions due to stress.
The lawsuit said Woodruff found out that she was taken into custody because “she was implicated as a suspect in a photo lineup shown to the victim…following an unreliable facial recognition match,” NBC News reported.
The charges stemmed from a late January encounter where the victim said he was robbed and carjacked by a woman he met on the road, according to reports. Per the New York Times, the two had sex at a liquor store and later at a BP gas station.
Court documents stated that when the victim arrived at another location to drop off the woman, an armed man appeared and took his Chevy Malibu, the outlet reported. The man, who was waiting on site for the woman, also allegedly took the victim’s phone and wallet. According to The Times, the woman returned the phone to the BP gas station days after the incident.
When Oliver obtained the security footage from the gas station, she used facial identification, which linked Woodruff as the suspect in the video, per the reports. Additionally, when the victim was shown different people in the lineup, he pointed out Woodruff, however, the photo of her that was used was from a prior arrest in 2015. The police, according to reports citing court records, had access to Woodruff’s most up-to-date driver’s license. The victim also reportedly did not describe the woman as pregnant to police.
According to reports, the charges against Woodruff were dismissed because of insufficient evidence. This is not the first time police in Detroit have been in hot water due to facial recognition technology, advocates say. The American Liberties Union of Michigan said it happened before, CBS News reported.
“Ms. Woodruff is the sixth person in the nation—and the third in Detroit alone—to report being falsely accused of a crime as a result of facial recognition technology used by police to attempt to match an unknown suspect’s face to a photograph in a database,” the organization claimed, per the outlet. “All six people have been Black and Ms. Woodruff is the first woman to report it happening to her.”
Earlier this year, a Georgia man said botched facial recognition resulted in his arrest, and he was jailed for more than a week.
