A New Jersey man who was wrongly jailed after being misidentified through facial recognition software has a message for two Ontario police agencies now using the same technology.
“There’s clear evidence that it doesn’t work,” Nijeer Parks said.
Parks, now 36, spent 10 days behind bars for a January 2019 theft and assault on a police officer that he didn’t commit. He said he was released after he provided evidence he was in another city, making a money transfer at the time of the offence. Prosecutors dropped the case the following November, according to an internal police report.
Investigators identified Parks as a suspect using facial recognition technology, according to police documents provided as part of a lawsuit filed by Parks’s lawyer against several defendants, including police and the mayor of Woodbridge, N.J. The lawsuit names French tech firm Idemia as the developer of the software.
Police in Peel and York regions, near Toronto, announced in late May they were jointly implementing Idemia’s technology, which they will use to compare existing mugshots with crime scene images of suspects and persons of interest.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Police in Peel and York regions, near Toronto, announced in late May they were jointly implementing Idemia’s technology, which they will use to compare existing mugshots with crime scene images of suspects and persons of interest.
The photo had come from a fake Tennessee driver’s licence the suspect provided to officers at the scene of the theft, according to a police report submitted as a court exhibit in the civil case.
Two days later, an investigator emailed a Woodbridge detective a PDF file containing a “good possible hit on facial recognition,” according to court exhibits reviewed by CBC News.
“Idemia Face Expert will be used to aid human decision-making, not replace it,” Peel Regional Police Deputy Chief Nick Milinovich said in a video posted online.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) earlier this year filed a court brief in support of Parks, stating “officers unreasonably relied on a shaky lead from fundamentally unreliable technology.”
In slides prepared for a 2018 presentation titled “Face Recognition Evaluation @ Idemia,” a representative wrote the company’s algorithm has the “same [false positive identification rate] for Black or white subjects, male or female.”
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