AI misidentification results in wrongful arrest; man seeks justice
wsoctv.com
wsoctv.com
> 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.
(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)
That's why the cops followed up with a photo lineup shown to the victim before applying for a warrant.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/03/18/fargo-polices-use-o...
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.
That is the answer to your question.
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.
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)
These clowns need to be taken for all the money they can
> 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."
How can you tell?
There was an example months ago but I don’t keep track of the specifics
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#downvo...
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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.
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.
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.