How a New Jersey man was wrongly arrested through facial recognition tech now in use in Ontario
CBC
A New Jersey man who was wrongly jailed after being misidentified through facial recognition software has a message for two Ontario police agencies now using the same technology.
"There's clear evidence that it doesn't work," Nijeer Parks said.
Parks, now 36, spent 10 days behind bars for a January 2019 theft and assault on a police officer that he didn't commit. He said he was released after he provided evidence he was in another city, making a money transfer at the time of the offence. Prosecutors dropped the case the following November, according to an internal police report.
Investigators identified Parks as a suspect using facial recognition technology, according to police documents provided as part of a lawsuit filed by Parks's lawyer against several defendants, including police and the mayor of Woodbridge, N.J. The lawsuit names French tech firm Idemia as the developer of the software.
Police in Peel and York regions, near Toronto, announced in late May they were jointly implementing Idemia's technology, which they will use to compare existing mugshots with crime scene images of suspects and persons of interest.
Parks said his case highlights the limitations of such software.
"He doesn't look anything like me," Parks, who is Black, said of the man in the picture that police used to identify him. "I'm like … you're basically telling me we all look alike."
The photo had come from a fake Tennessee driver's licence the suspect provided to officers at the scene of the theft, according to a police report submitted as a court exhibit in the civil case.
The man was accused of stealing snacks from a hotel gift shop in Woodbridge, N.J., and nearly running over an officer as he later sped away.
Two days later, an investigator emailed a Woodbridge detective a PDF file containing a "good possible hit on facial recognition," according to court exhibits reviewed by CBC News.
"That's him," the detective replied, referring to the suspect from the hotel incident.
Parks was arrested and charged with a series of offences, including aggravated assault and resisting arrest. According to a transcript of his police interview, he told an investigator he had, in fact, never been to Woodbridge, which is roughly 40 kilometres from his home in Paterson, N.J.
Parks recently described to CBC the ordeal as an "out-of-body experience, because it was something that I couldn't believe was happening."
In Ontario, police insist they've implemented safeguards to prevent a mismatch from resulting in an arrest.
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