An attorney claims that a Georgia man was wrongfully arrested in Louisiana on a fugitive warrant because of the state's use of facial recognition technology.
This now brings a renewed focus to racial inequities in the usage of digital tools.
Wrongful Arrest
According to ABC News, 28-year-old Randall Reid was arrested in late November 2022 in DeKalb County, Georgia.
Reid's lawyer, Tommy Calogero, argues the police made an incorrect connection between Reid with a series of handbag thefts in Jefferson Parish and Baton Rouge. Having been taken into custody on November 25, 2022, Reid was finally freed on December 1, 2022.
As a Black man, Reid's arrest has brought renewed scrutiny to the usage of a technology that, according to some, leads to a disproportionately high number of false positives when used on individuals of color.
"They told me I had a warrant out of Jefferson Parish. I said, 'What is Jefferson Parish?'" Reid explained.
"I have never been to Louisiana a day in my life. Then they told me it was for theft. So not only have I not been to Louisiana; I also don't steal."
Calogero said that Reid was wrongfully implicated in the theft of high-end goods from a consignment store in Metairie, a New Orleans suburb located in Jefferson Parish, back in June.
According to court documents obtained by the media, a detective with the Baton Rouge Police Department used the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office's identification of Reid to receive an arrest warrant. The charges conveyed that he was one of three men involved in the theft of another luxury purse the same week.
Calogero calculated a 40-pound difference between Reid and the purse thief on surveillance film, and this, along with differences like a mole on Reid's face, led the Jefferson sheriff to revoke the request.
The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate (which first reported the news) requested information from the office of Jefferson Sheriff Joe Lopinto on the arrest and release of Reid, the department's use of face recognition, and any safeguards around the technology but received no responses.
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System Utilization
The employment of face recognition technology in light of Reid's case has received fresh criticism in Louisiana and elsewhere.
Some studies have indicated that facial recognition technology is considerably more likely to misidentify Black and other persons of color than white individuals. This leads to wrongful arrests, which has prompted widespread condemnation of the technology.
New Orleans police said that officers need permission from superiors before submitting a request for face recognition technology to the Louisiana State Analytic and Fusion Exchange in Baton Rouge and that the technology can only be used for the generation of evidence.
The most up-to-date local regulations mandates that independent face recognition experts check all potential matches.
A bill that would have placed statewide restrictions on face recognition technology failed to pass in 2021.
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