Wrongful Arrest Exposes Failures in One of the Oldest Police Face-Recognition Tools in the US

A Florida man was wrongfully arrested for attempting to illegally lure a child after police relied on a face-recognition match that was inaccurate, according to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday, even though he lived more than 300 miles from the scene and says he had never set foot in the city where the crime took place.

Robert Dillon, a 52-year-old commercial crabber from Fort Myers, was arrested after FACES—a face-recognition system operated by Florida’s Pinellas County Sheriff's Office—matched his face against a photo of a man on a computer screen taken with a cell phone. The system returned a “93 percent match on facial features,” according to police-investigatory notes. The scores it emits represent how much two images look alike to the algorithm. Not how likely it is that they show the same person.

FACES holds tens of millions of Florida mug shots and driver's license photos and is one of the longest-running police face-recognition databases in the United States.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the suit, says Dillon was arrested at his home in front of his wife, held overnight in a cold cell, and transported in a caged, unlit van. He pledged the title to his truck to make bond. The arrest came during peak stone crab season, causing him to fall behind on rent and nearly lose his home. His mug shot stayed online for nearly a year, removed from the county website only after a TV reporter intervened.

Strangers approach Dillon in public to ask about the case, the complaint says, and he no longer feels comfortable talking to children.

The incident took place shortly before midnight on November 2, 2023, at a McDonald's in Jacksonville Beach, where a man allegedly approached a girl under 12 and repeatedly asked her to leave with him. She refused. After he approached her a second time, she called for her mother. The man left before the police arrived.

The complaint lays out several facts that pointed away from Dillon and never reached the judge who signed the warrant for his arrest. A manager at the McDonald's told investigators the suspect was a “regular customer” she had seen there multiple times. According to the complaint, Dillon had never visited Jacksonville Beach, living hundreds of miles away.

A Jacksonville Beach police officer assigned to the case sent an attempt-to-identify bulletin to surrounding agencies later that November using cell phone photos of the McDonald’s surveillance footage. A sergeant with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office (JSO) ran the images through FACES and sent back the “93 percent match” to Dillon's name. The investigating officer then requested a search of license plate readers for two vehicles registered to Dillon, covering the days around the incident. Neither turned up anywhere in the county, according to the complaint, which says the results were omitted from the warrant application.

Six months passed with no further investigation, the complaint says. In July 2024, the officer submitted the warrant. A judge signed it, and Dillon was arrested the following month. He retained a criminal defense attorney and, that October, pleaded not guilty. The State Attorney's Office dropped all charges a few weeks later. The investigating officer was nevertheless promoted by the end of the year.

“I will never get over how terrified and worried I was, wondering if I’d ever go home to my wife and daughter again,” Dillon says in a statement shared by his attorneys. “Over a year later, I'm still picking up the pieces of my life, all because the police relied on this dangerous technology instead of doing their jobs and actually investigating.”

The suit names the investigating officer and the JSO sergeant individually, and also targets the City of Jacksonville Beach, the Jacksonville Sheriff, and the Pinellas County Sheriff in their official capacities. It seeks compensatory and punitive damages, and asks a court to order all three agencies to overhaul their face-recognition policies.

“Due to pending litigation, we would be unable to comment further on the incident,” a Jacksonville Sheriff's Office spokesperson tells WIRED in a statement. The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters told local news station Action News Jax after the case was dropped that a face-recognition hit alone would not constitute probable cause in his office: “If you came to me with a facial-recognition hit and that was your probable cause, I would probably kick you out of my office,” he said.

FACES has been operated by the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office since 2001, making it one of the oldest police face-recognition systems in the country. At its peak in 2021, its tens of millions of Florida mug shots and driver's license photos were accessible to more than 260 agencies—including the FBI and ICE. To use the system, investigators upload an image of a suspect, the system compares it against the gallery, and it returns a ranked list of possible matches.

The system has long operated with little oversight. A 2016 study by Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology found that Pinellas County Sheriff's Office conducted no audits of how the database was searched and required no reasonable suspicion to run a query. Asked whether the office audited searches for misuse, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri replied, “No, not really.” Florida agencies have also used FACES to scan peaceful protesters, according to reporting by the Sun Sentinel and Pulitzer Center.

ACLU says Dillon's case is one of at least 15 known wrongful arrests in the United States attributed to face-recognition technology. Earlier this year, the same Jacksonville Sheriff's Office wrongfully arrested a North Carolina man in an auto-theft investigation. According to Action News Jax, he spent nearly three months in jail after an 85 percent match led to his arrest. By the time the charges were dropped, he had lost his home, his job, and custody of his two kids.

“No one should lose their freedom or be scared to leave their house because an algorithm got it wrong,” says Nate Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, who called on Florida police departments to make amends and adopt safeguards to prevent future wrongful arrests.

“Police across the country are on notice,” adds Wessler. “Unreliable face-recognition technology is hurting people, and we will keep fighting to hold them accountable for these abuses.”