Robert Williams: How black Michigan man became first person to fall prey to a racist facial recognition tech
DETROIT, MICHIGAN: Robert Julian-Borchak Williams was in his office on a Thursday afternoon in January when he received a call from the Detriot Police Department to come to the station to be arrested. Williams, at first, brushed it off as a prank.
But when he pulled into the driveway of his residence in Farmington Hills, Michigan an hour later, a cop car pulled up behind him and blocked him in. Williams was subsequently handcuffed by two officers on his front lawn, in full view of his wife and two young daughters, who couldn't believe their eyes. When asked why he was being arrested, police only flashed a piece of paper with his photo and pointed to the words “felony warrant” and “larceny.”
Melissa, Williams' wife, asked where her husband was being taken. “Google it,” she recalled one of the officers responding.
Williams was driven to a detention center where authorities took his mug shot, fingerprints as well as DNA. He was held overnight and taken into an interrogation room the following afternoon. Two detectives placed three pieces of paper on the table in front of him, face down.
“When’s the last time you went to a Shinola store?” one of the detectives asked, Williams recalled in an op-ed he wrote for The Washington Post.
Shinola is an upmarket boutique store that sells luxury watches, bicycles, and leather items in the coveted Midtown neighborhood of Detriot. Williams told the investigators that he and his wife had checked it out when the outlet first opened in 2014, but not after that.
This prompted one of the detectives to turn over the first piece of paper, which revealed a screengrab from surveillance footage at the store. It showed a stocky male dressed in black and donning a red St. Louis Cardinals cap and standing in front of a watch display. It emerged that five timepieces worth $3,800 were stolen from the store on the day the video was recorded.
“Is this you?” the detective directly asked Williams, before turning the second piece of paper — a closeup of the previous screengrab. Williams immediately realized the mistake and picked up the paper, holding it next to his face for the detectives.
"When I look at the picture of the guy, I just see a big Black guy. I don't see a resemblance. I don't think he looks like me at all," Williams told NPR. "[The detective] flips the third page over and says, 'So I guess the computer got it wrong, too.' And I said, 'Well, that's me,' pointing at a picture of my previous driver's license," Williams said of the interrogation. "But that guy's not me," he told the detectives, referring to the other images.
"I picked it up and held it to my face and told him, 'I hope you don't think all Black people look alike,'" Williams said.
While Williams knew he hadn't committed the crime, he had no idea that his case would become the first known account of an American citizen being wrongfully arrested due to the faulty algorithm of a facial recognition system.
Williams' story emerged at a time when nationwide protests against racial injustice and police brutality continue to grab headlines every day. Millions of Americans are protesting bias in the systems used to monitor communities and identify suspects for prosecution.
It's worth noting that facial recognition systems have been used by law enforcement for decades. The technology works relatively well on white men, but results are less than accurate for other demographics — per recent studies by MIT and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST. This is, in part, because of a lack of diversity in database images that are used to train the algorithm, experts say.
During a public hearing about the use of facial recognition in Detroit last year, an assistant police chief raised similar concerns. “On the question of false positives — that is absolutely factual, and it’s well-documented,” James White said. “So that concerns me as an African-American male.”
Williams' case was dismissed two weeks after his wrongful arrest, but it was “without prejudice," meaning he was vulnerable to being charged again, according to the New York Times. Furthermore, the ACLU has noted that Williams' DNA sample, mugshot, fingerprints are still on record as a result of his arrest. "If someone wants to pull my name and look me up," Williams said, "who wants to be seen as a thief?"
Speaking to The Times, a Detroit police spokesperson said they had accepted the prosecutor's decision to dismiss the case, adding that the department's policy was to use facial recognition only while investigating violent crimes.
Major tech companies, including the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, have announced they would be stopping facial recognition research and development for law enforcement in light of the ongoing protests. In a statement earlier this month, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said that "now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies."
However, a number of experts are calling for a longer moratorium on using the technology, arguing that some firms may simply wait for the outrage to simmer down before resuming sales to law enforcement. Williams' case is a testament to the ramifications a false arrest can have on someone's life.
“My daughters can’t unsee me being handcuffed and put into a police car,” the embattled father wrote in his op-ed. “But they can see me use this experience to bring some good into the world. That means helping make sure my daughters don’t grow up in a world where their driver’s license or Facebook photos could be used to target, track, or harm them.”