Florida lawsuit alleges wrongful arrest after police AI facial recognition error

Police officers patrol the beach in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, on 18 April 2020. Photograph: Eve Edelheit/Bloomberg via Getty Images View image in fullscreen Police officers patrol the beach in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, on 18 April 2020. Photograph: Eve Edelheit/Bloomberg via Getty Images Florida lawsuit alleges wrongful arrest after police AI facial recognition error Robert Dillon was arrested at home in Florida despite living 300 miles away, and charges were later dropped Sign up for the Breaking News US newsletter email A Florida man is suing several law enforcement agencies for his arrest and prosecution for allegedly luring a child after he was wrongly identified using faulty AI facial recognition software. According to the Jacksonville Beach police department, an algorithm returned a 93% probability that Robert Dillon was the man caught on security cameras at a McDonald’s in the town attempting to persuade the unaccompanied girl, aged younger than 12, to leave with him. Dillon, however, lives in Fort Myers, more than 300 miles and a five-hour drive away, and told detectives he had never been to Jacksonville Beach in his life. The case was dismissed and charges dropped last year over the August 2024 incident. Now the 52-year-old has filed a lawsuit against the police department, the Jacksonville sheriff’s office, and Bob Gualtieri, the sheriff of Pinellas county, whose agency maintains and operates the Faces (Face Analysis Comparison and Examination) system and leases it to other law enforcement. “[The] investigation resulted in the wrongful arrest and prosecution of an innocent man,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in a lawsuit filed on Dillon’s behalf on Tuesday in district court in Fort Myers. “Mr Dillon was arrested at his home in front of his wife. He was accused of attempting to lure a child, a charge carrying devastating social stigma and permanent reputational destruction. He was subjected to months of criminal prosecution, and publicly branded with a mugshot that remains accessible online, long after the charges were dropped. “He no longer feels comfortable being friendly to children. No law enforcement agency has ever apologized or acknowledged the error.” The lawsuit further alleges that Dillon’s case is at least the 15th nationally to have involved a person being charged or arrested after a false identification . A Guardian investigation last month found that oversight of AI facial recognition systems was woefully inadequate, in the UK and elsewhere, and that advances in the technology were far outpacing authorities’ ability to regulate it. “Rather than test the machine’s answer against the evidence that would have cleared him, the officers built a case to confirm it,” Dillon’s lawsuit said. It identified Scott O’Connell, JBPD’s lead investigator on the case, as having deliberately omitted “multiple categories of readily verifiable exculpatory evidence” from the arrest affidavit. The court document said licens