A Michigan woman who was eight months pregnant became the latest person to be falsely charged after police used facial recognition technology to arrest her on suspicion of carjacking and robbery.
Porcha Woodruff, 32, was shocked when six police officers showed up at her Detroit-area home as she was getting her two children ready for school on February 16.
Woodruff, who was a month away from giving birth, thought the cops were playing a prank when they showed her a warrant for robbery and carjacking – given that she was visibly pregnant at the time – but they put in her handcuffs.
‘Are you kidding?’ asked Woodruff, who filed a lawsuit for wrongful arrest against the city of Detroit in US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan Thursday.
Woodruff even had to go to a medical center later that day after experiencing contractions – describing ‘sharp pains,’ ‘spasms’ and even a panic attack – caused by dehydration while sitting on the prison’s concrete benches. The charges were dropped 18 days later.
Porcha Woodruff, 32, saw six police officers show up at her Detroit-area home as she was preparing her two children for school on February 16. The half dozen police officers showed Woodruff a warrant for robbery and carjacking based off facial recognition technology
‘Ms. Woodruff later discovered that she was implicated as a suspect through a photo lineup shown to the victim of the robbery and carjacking, following an unreliable facial recognition match,’ the court documents read.
The lawsuit only names Detective LaShauntia Oliver, who was assigned to the original case, as a defendant.
About two and a half weeks earlier, a 25-year-old man called police from a liquor store claiming to have been robbed at gunpoint, according to the lawsuit.
The victim said that he had picked up a woman and had sex with her after drinking in his car at a BP gas station.
He dropped her off ten minutes from the station, only to discover a man with a handgun who took his wallet and phone before fleeing in the victim’s Chevy Malibu.
Police arrested the man a few days later, with a woman matching the description given by the victim dropping off his phone at the gas station, according to police.
A facial recognition search done by independent vendor DataWorks Plus was requested by Oliver using surveillance footage.
A police report made by a human crime analyst suggested Woodruff after analyzing a 2015 mug shot, which she said was for being pulled over for driving with an expired license.
Woodruff was then identified by the victim as the woman he had been with in a lineup of six photos which was what led to her arrest.
‘Detective Oliver stated in detail in her report what she observed in the video footage, and there was no mention of the female suspect being pregnant,’ the lawsuit states.
Woodruff, who was a month away from giving birth, thought the cops were playing a prank given that she was visibly pregnant at the time but they put in her handcuffs
Officers took her into custody from her Metro Detroit area home and kept her there for most of the day. She was released on $10,000 bond
It was also noted that the suspect had not been shown a picture of Woodruff for potential identification.
Woodruff spent the day in jail and was charged with robbery and carjacking, let out on $100,000 personal bond that evening, despite her and her fiance urging officers to check the warrant to see if the suspect was visibly pregnant but refused.
She had to go straight to a medical center after she was released and diagnosed with a low heart rate from dehydration. Woodruff, a nursing student and licensed aesthetician, even experienced contractions.
‘I was having contractions in the holding cell,’ she said. ‘My back was sending me sharp pains. I was having spasms.’
‘I think I was probably having a panic attack. I was hurting, sitting on those concrete benches.’
The case was dropped by the county prosecutor on March 6 due to ‘insufficient evidence.’
‘I have reviewed the allegations contained in the lawsuit. They are very concerning,’ Detroit Police Chief James E. White said in a statement.
‘We are taking this matter very seriously, but we cannot comment further at this time due to the need for additional investigation.’
Oliver has not responded to requests for comment.
Randal Quran Reid, 29, was falsely arrested on November 25, 2021 during a traffic stop outside Atlanta, on two theft warrants out of Baton Rouge and Jefferson Parish in Louisiana
Nijeer Parks, 33, is suing Woodbridge Township for false imprisonment after the technology was used on him
As facial recognition technology becomes more common in practice, people falsely identified have become more common as well.
This is the third case involving Detroit police, which runs about 125 facial recognition searches a year, according to the New York Times. Almost all of the searches were conducted on black men.
Louisiana authorities’ use of facial recognition technology led to the mistaken arrest of a Georgia man on a fugitive warrant, an attorney said in a case that renews attention to racial disparities in the use of the digital tool.
Randall Reid, 28, was jailed on November 25 in DeKalb County, Georgia, after authorities misidentified him as a purse theft in Jefferson Parish and Baton Rouge.
In 2020, a New Jersey man filed a civil suit accusing police of falsely arresting him based solely on the software, which was later banned in the Garden State.
Nijeer Parks, 33, was held in jail for 10 days, falsely charged in a 2019 shoplifting incident in Woodbridge that ended with the thief ramming a parked police car as he escaped.
Cities like San Francisco, Boston and Portland and states such as New Jersey have banned police from using facial recognition technology. In Michigan, it is considered a last resort but is still legal.
HOW DOES FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY WORK?
Facial recognition software works by matching real time images to a previous photograph of a person.
Each face has approximately 80 unique nodal points across the eyes, nose, cheeks and mouth which distinguish one person from another.
A digital video camera measures the distance between various points on the human face, such as the width of the nose, depth of the eye sockets, distance between the eyes and shape of the jawline.
This produces a unique numerical code that can then be linked with a matching code gleaned from a previous photograph.
Facial recognition systems have faced criticism because of their mass surveillance capabilities, which raise privacy concerns, and because some studies have shown that the technology is far more likely to misidentify Black and other people of color than white people, which has resulted in mistaken arrests.
The research comes amid the widespread deployment of facial recognition technology for law enforcement, airports, banking, retailing, and smartphones.
Failures could lead to the ‘wrong people being arrested’ and ‘lengthy interrogations’ according to Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union.
A National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) study conducted in 2019 found two algorithms assigned the wrong gender to black females 35 percent of the time.
Activists and researchers have claimed the potential for errors is too great and that mistakes could result in the jailing of innocent people.
They also claimed that the technology could be used to create databases that may be hacked or inappropriately used.
The NIST study found both ‘false positives,’ in which an individual is mistakenly identified, and ‘false negatives,’ where the algorithm fails to accurately match a face to a specific person in a database.
An expert in facial recognition software from the MIT Media Lab says that this study shows the proliferation of face surveillance should be halted to protect people.
