Georgia man, 29, spends a week in jail after faulty facial recognition system ID

A Georgia man has spoken out after he was falsely accused of robbery based on faulty facial recognition identification, and spent nearly a week in jail before charges were dropped.

Randal Quran Reid, 29, was mistakenly arrested Nov. 25 during a traffic stop outside Atlanta for two burglary warrants in Baton Rouge and Jefferson Parish in Louisiana.

It later emerged that the charges were related to the use of stolen credit cards to purchase more than $13,000 worth of Chanel and Louis Vuitton designer handbags at a thrift store outside New Orleans and another store in Baton Rouge.

However, Reid, who works as a transportation analyst, was baffled by the charges, because he had never been to Louisiana and initially had no idea he had been linked to the crimes through facial recognition.

“I’m locked up for something I have no idea about,” Reid told the New York Times in a report on the case released Friday.

Reid was charged with using stolen credit cards to buy more than $13,000 worth of designer Chanel and Louis Vuitton handbags at a thrift store outside New Orleans.

Reid ended up spending six days in jail before the bogus charges were dropped, lost a week of work and spent thousands of dollars on defense attorneys in both Georgia and Louisiana before investigators admitted their mistake.

The case is not the first false arrest based on facial recognition technology, but it illustrates the dangers when charges come from AI in a way that is not clear to defendants or judges.

According to the Times, none of the court documents in the case mentioned facial recognition, and the arrest warrant affidavit cited a “credible source.”

But a person with direct knowledge of the investigation confirmed to the newspaper that facial recognition technology had been used to identify Reid as the man seen on surveillance cameras at the thrift store in Jefferson Parish.

Sheriff’s investigators apparently used facial recognition technology to scan surveillance footage of the store and falsely identified Reid as the burly black man seen using the stolen credit card.

The charges in Baton Rouge appeared to stem directly from that case, after the same stolen credit card was used to make more fraudulent purchases.

The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office in 2019 signed a contract with a facial recognition provider, Clearview AI, to which it pays $25,000 a year, according to the Times.

Reid ended up spending six days in jail before the bogus charges were dropped, missing a week of work, and spending thousands of dollars on defense attorneys.

Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That (above) said an arrest should not be based on a facial recognition search alone.

Spokesmen for Clearview AI and the Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to DailyMail.com’s requests for comment on Friday afternoon.

The company’s chief executive, Hoan Ton-That, told the Times that an arrest should not be based on a facial recognition search alone.

“Even if Clearview AI does get the initial result, that is the beginning of the investigation by the police to determine, based on other factors, whether the correct person has been identified,” he said.

Over a million searches have been performed using Clearview AI. One false arrest is one too many, and we have great empathy for the person who was wrongly accused.’

Sheriff Joseph P. Lopinto III of Jefferson Parish told the outlet that Reid’s arrest was “unfortunate by all means.”

“As soon as we realized it wasn’t him, we moved mountains to get him out of jail,” he added.

Several years ago, many US jurisdictions banned the use of facial recognition by law enforcement, citing racial bias in the technology and false IDs, often of black people.

But the technology has made a comeback due to rising crime rates, with several cities and states reversing their bans.