A New Jersey man filed a lawsuit against local police and prosecutors, claiming he was arrested and imprisoned by mistake after facial recognition software wrongly linked him to a hotel theft.
Nijeer Parks, a 33-year-old black man from Patterson, said his grandmother told him on January 30, 2019 that an arrest warrant was issued against him, according to the civil suit opened in Passaic County.
He was accused of shoplifting at a Hampton Inn gift shop in Woodbridge and then running over a police car while running away. But in early 2019, Parks said he didn’t have a car and, at the time, never had a driver’s license.
Parks said he went to Woodbridge police headquarters on February 5 to clarify the error, but was arrested.
“As he had previously told the clerk, the plaintiff told interrogators that (he) never had a driver’s license, that he never owned a car and that he was never in Woodbridge,” according to Parks’ attorney Daniel Sexton.
“The Claimant also gave … a solid alibi that proved that he could not have done what he was suspected of doing.”
While Parks was in prison for 10 days, he claimed that the police and prosecutors did not bother to check the fingerprints and DNA left on the scene that could have released him.
“The defendant’s police department was relying only on defective and illegal software (facial recognition software) or some similar program, while all evidence and expertise confirmed that the plaintiff had no relationship with the suspect for the crimes,” according to Sexton.
Sexton says all charges against Parks have been dropped.
County prosecutors and jailers, the Woodbridge police and the mayor are named as defendants in the lawsuit.
A Woodbridge spokesman declined to comment on Tuesday, claiming that no one in the county had been informed of the case yet. Prosecutors ‘and jailers’ representatives did not immediately return messages asking for their response.
While the use of facial recognition technology is growing, critics believe that the algorithms struggle to distinguish the faces of people with dark skin.
Nathan Freed Wessler, a lawyer on the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project team, said on Tuesday that Parks’s arrest was the result of “flawed and privacy-invasive surveillance technology”.
“There are probably many more interrogations, arrests and possibly even convictions because of this technology that we don’t yet know about,” said Wessler in a statement, adding that “this technology disproportionately harms the black community.”
