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Another Arrest, and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match

A New Jersey man was accused of shoplifting and trying to hit an officer with a car. He is the third known Black man to be wrongfully arrested based on face recognition.

Nijeer Parks is the third person known to be arrested for a crime he did not commit based on a bad face recognition match.Credit...Mohamed Sadek for The New York Times

In February 2019, Nijeer Parks was accused of shoplifting candy and trying to hit a police officer with a car at a Hampton Inn in Woodbridge, N.J. The police had identified him using facial recognition software, even though he was 30 miles away at the time of the incident.

Mr. Parks spent 10 days in jail and paid around $5,000 to defend himself. In November 2019, the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.

Mr. Parks, 33, is now suing the police, the prosecutor and the City of Woodbridge for false arrest, false imprisonment and violation of his civil rights.

He is the third person known to be falsely arrested based on a bad facial recognition match. In all three cases, the people mistakenly identified by the technology have been Black men.

Facial recognition technology is known to have flaws. In 2019, a national study of over 100 facial recognition algorithms found that they did not work as well on Black and Asian faces. Two other Black men — Robert Williams and Michael Oliver, who both live in the Detroit area — were also arrested for crimes they did not commit based on bad facial recognition matches. Like Mr. Parks, Mr. Oliver sued over the wrongful arrest.

Nathan Freed Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who believes that the police should stop using face recognition technology, said the three cases demonstrated “how this technology disproportionately harms the Black community.”

“Multiple people have now come forward about being wrongfully arrested because of this flawed and privacy-invading surveillance technology,” Mr. Wessler said. He worries that there have been other arrests and even mistaken convictions that have not been uncovered.

Law enforcement often defends the use of facial recognition, despite its flaws, by saying it is used only as a clue in a case and will not lead directly to an arrest. But Mr. Parks’s experience is another example of an arrest based almost solely on a suggested match by the technology.

On a Saturday in January 2019, two police officers showed up at the Hampton Inn in Woodbridge after receiving a report about a man stealing snacks from the gift shop.

The alleged shoplifter — a Black man, nearly 6 feet tall, wearing a black jacket — was visiting a Hertz office in the hotel lobby, trying to get the rental agreement for a gray Dodge Challenger extended. The officers confronted him, and he apologized, according to the police report. He said he would pay for the snacks and gave the officers a Tennessee driver’s license.

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The Hampton Inn in Woodbridge, N.J.Credit...Mohamed Sadek for The New York Times

When the officers checked the license, they discovered it was fraudulent. According to a police report, one of the officers spotted a “big bag of suspected marijuana” in the man’s pocket. They tried to handcuff him. That was when the man ran, losing a shoe on the way to his rental car, police said.

As he drove off, the man hit a parked police car and a column in front of the hotel, the police said. One of the officers said he had to jump out of the way to avoid being hit. The rental car was later found abandoned in a parking lot a mile away.

A detective in the Woodbridge Police Department sent the photo from the fake driver’s license to state agencies that had access to face recognition technology, according to a police report.

The next day, state investigators said they had a facial recognition match: Nijeer Parks, who lived in Paterson, N.J., 30 miles away, and worked at a grocery store. The detective compared Mr. Parks’s New Jersey state ID with the fake Tennessee driver’s license and agreed it was the same person. After a Hertz employee confirmed that the license photo was of the shoplifter, the police issued a warrant for Mr. Parks’s arrest.

“I don’t think he looks like me,” Mr. Parks said. “The only thing we have in common is the beard.”

Mr. Parks’s mistaken arrest was first reported by NJ Advance Media, which said the facial recognition app Clearview AI had been used in the case, based on a claim in Mr. Parks’s lawsuit. His lawyer, Daniel Sexton, said he had inferred that Clearview AI was used, given media reports about facial recognition in New Jersey, but now believes he was mistaken.

Clearview AI is a facial recognition tool that uses billions of photos scraped from the public web, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Clearview AI’s founder, Hoan Ton-That, said officers affiliated with the state agencies where information was analyzed in the case, known as fusion centers, were not using his company’s app at that time.

According to the police report, the match in this case was to a license photo, which would reside in a government database, to which Clearview AI does not have access.

The state agencies asked to run the face recognition search — the New York State Intelligence Center, New Jersey’s Regional Operations Intelligence Center — said they did not make the match. Two investigators who identified Mr. Parks with facial recognition, at the Rockland County Sheriff’s Office and Palisades Interstate Parkway Police, have not responded to requests for comment. It is unclear how the Woodbridge Police Department’s request was sent to those two investigators.

In January, after a New York Times article about Clearview AI, New Jersey’s attorney general, Gurbir S. Grewal, put a moratorium on Clearview’s use by the police and announced an investigation into “this product or products like it.” A spokesman for the attorney general’s office said that New Jersey’s Division of Criminal Justice was still evaluating the use of facial recognition products in the state, and that the development of a policy governing their use was ongoing.

After his arrest, Mr. Parks was held for 10 days at the Middlesex County Corrections Center. New Jersey’s no-bail system uses an algorithm that evaluates the defendant’s risk rather than money to determine whether a defendant can be released before trial.

A decade ago, Mr. Parks was arrested twice and incarcerated for selling drugs. He was released in 2016. The public safety assessment score he received, which would have taken his past convictions into account, was high enough that he was not released after his first hearing. His mother and fiancée hired an attorney, who was able to get him out of jail and into a pretrial monitoring program.

His history with the criminal justice system is what made this incident so scary, he said, because this would have been his third felony, meaning he was at risk of a long sentence. When the prosecutor offered a plea deal, he almost took it even though he was innocent.

“I sat down with my family and discussed it,” Mr. Parks said. “I was afraid to go to trial. I knew I would get 10 years if I lost.”

Mr. Parks was able to get proof from Western Union that he had been sending money at a pharmacy in Haledon, N.J., when the incident happened. At his last court hearing, he told the judge that he was willing to go to trial to defend himself. But a few months later, his case was dismissed.

Robert Hubner, the chief of the Woodbridge Police Department, declined to comment on the case because of the pending lawsuit, but said his department had not been served the complaint. The Middlesex County prosecutor’s office also declined to comment.

Mr. Parks’s lawsuit over the wrongful arrest does not yet ask for damages.

“I was locked up for no reason,” Mr. Parks said. “I’ve seen it happen to other people. I’ve seen it on the news. I just never thought it would happen to me. It was a very scary ordeal.”

Jack Begg contributed research.

A correction was made on 
Jan. 6, 2021

An earlier version of this article, using information from a Woodbridge Police Department report, said that the New York State Intelligence Center and New Jersey's Regional Operations Center helped make a facial recognition match of a suspect in a shoplifting case in New Jersey. Both agencies denied that. The matches were made by the Rockland County Sheriff’s Office and Palisades Interstate Parkway Police.

How we handle corrections

Kashmir Hill is a tech reporter based in New York. She writes about the unexpected and sometimes ominous ways technology is changing our lives, particularly when it comes to our privacy. More about Kashmir Hill

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Facial Match And Arrest Go Wrong. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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