A 43-year-old Black man is suing the Detroit Police Department after he was wrongfully arrested and identified as a shoplifting suspect by the department’s facial recognition software, according to the Washington Post.

Robert Williams, a father of two girls who lives in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills, was arrested last year after being accused of taking watches from a Shinola store. Cops used a facial recognition search of the store’s surveillance-camera footage that identified Williams as the culprit. Of course, he wasn’t their guy. Williams said he was driving home from work when the 2018 crime was committed. He was interrogated and held in jail for 30 hours before being let go.

Prosecutors dropped the charges two weeks later after admitting they didn’t have sufficient evidence. DPD Chief James Craig apologized for the arrest, saying his detectives did “shoddy” investigative work.

Williams’ lawyers did not make him available for comment on the case, but he wrote in the Washington Post last year that the arrest left him shaken, in part because his young daughters had watched him get arrested in his driveway and put into a police car after returning from work.

“How does one explain to two little girls that a computer got it wrong, but the police listened to it anyway?” he wrote. “As any other black man would be, I had to consider what could happen if I asked too many questions or displayed my anger openly — even though I knew I had done nothing wrong.”

Research has shown

As the Post reports, the technology has a lot of problems: