I’m a victim of flawed facial recognition technology. This CA bill must be stopped | Opinion

My name is Robert Williams, and I may be the first known person in the United States to be arrested for a crime I did not commit based on a false facial recognition match.

This nightmarish ordeal upended my life and terrified my wife and children. I know from firsthand experience that this technology is inherently flawed and racially biased. Law enforcement absolutely should not have access to it, and that is why I urge the California Legislature to vote against Assembly Bill 642, a dangerous bill that would lead to more misidentifications and wrongful arrests like mine.

My story began in January 2020. I was finishing work and received a phone call from Detroit police advising me to turn myself in. They refused to tell me why, so I assumed it was a prank.

When I arrived home not long after, police officers were waiting for me. With no explanation, they handcuffed me on my front lawn while my distressed wife and young daughters watched. At the detention center, officers took my fingerprints, DNA sample and mugshot. Scared and confused, I spent the night on the cold and filthy concrete floor of an overcrowded cell.

The next day, the police accused me of stealing thousands of dollars’ worth of watches from a store I hadn’t visited in years.

I could prove I was driving home from my job 40 minutes outside of Detroit at the time of the robbery, but it didn’t matter. Facial recognition software had matched a blurry image pulled from the store’s surveillance footage to my driver’s license photo. A security consultant who watched the video, but who had not seen the suspect in person, picked me out of a photo lineup.

I spent 30 hours in custody before I was allowed to return to my worried family. It then took months for the county prosecutor’s office to expunge my record and delete my fingerprints from the police department’s database.

In the years following my arrest, police have similarly misidentified and detained four other individuals that we know of. All of us are Black men, and all of us suffered the trauma of being wrenched from our families, isolated and interrogated by police officers who dismissed our claims of innocence because they believed the technology was infallible.

In my case, Detroit police are not supposed to treat face recognition matches as the only proof they need to charge someone with a crime. But instead of collecting corroborating evidence, they relied on an out-of-focus image a faulty algorithm had determined was me.

Now, California is considering a facial recognition law its authors claim will prevent abuse. But it would be a grave mistake to assume that AB 642 will prevent what happened to me from happening to people in California. Even if the bill instructs officers not to solely rely on facial recognition results, once the software identifies a match, police will think they’ve found the right person. As in my case, they will zero in and disregard evidence that doesn’t fit their chosen narrative.

There is no acceptable number of misidentifications. One out of 50? One out of 100? One out of 10,000? It’s all too high. If AB 642 passes, more innocent people will be put in harm’s way, and they may not be as lucky as I was to avoid a conviction or even a fatal encounter with police.

My false match traumatized my entire family. To this day, my daughters still cry at the memory of my arrest.

The only safe path forward is a total prohibition on police use of face recognition. Please, vote no on AB 642.