The city of Detroit is being sued after police used facial recognition software which led to the wrongful arrest of a pregnant mother with two young children, via NBC News.
“The warrant was appropriate based upon the facts,” the prosecutor said.
Detective LaShauntia Oliver is implicated in the lawsuit after being assigned a case involving a man who was robbed and carjacked in February.
Oliver ran facial recognition technology which matched an eight-year-old picture of Porcha Woodruff from a previous arrest. Despite having access to her current driver’s license photo, the lawsuit alleges that Oliver used the dated image to implicate Woodruff.
Woodruff, 32, had been preparing her two daughters for school when the police came to arrest her.
Woodruff was eight months pregnant at the time. In disbelief, she thought that the officers were joking with her. But when it became clear they were serious she was taken into custody.
She spent the day sitting in jail on a concrete bench where she experienced stress-related contractions and was later diagnosed with dehydration. Woodruff and her fiance asked the police to read the warrant for any indication that the suspect was pregnant, but the lawsuit alleges the officers refused to do so.
Woodruff was released on a $100,000 bond after being charged with the crimes around 7 p.m.
According to the lawsuit, the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office later dropped the charges against Woodruff due to “insufficient evidence.”
Detroit Police Chief James E. White called the allegations in the lawsuit “very concerning” and stated they are “taking this matter very seriously.”
According to the New York Times, Woodruff is the sixth person wrongly accused of crimes due to faulty facial recognition software, and that in each of these cases the technology misidentified black suspects.
