Pregnant mother of two wrongly arrested for robbery and carjacking after fake facial recognition says she went into labor in jail: ‘Bad technology’ has led to SIX people – all black – being wrongly charged

By James On Aug 7, 2023

A Michigan woman who was eight months pregnant became the latest person to be falsely charged after police used facial recognition technology to arrest her on suspicion of carjacking and robbery.

Porcha Woodruff, 32, was shocked when six police officers showed up at her home in the Detroit area on Feb. 16 as she got her two kids ready for school.

Woodruff, who was due to give birth in a month, thought the police were playing a joke when they showed her an arrest warrant for theft and carjacking – given that she was visibly pregnant at the time – but they handcuffed her.

“Are you joking?” asked Woodruff, who on Thursday filed a wrongful arrest lawsuit against the city of Detroit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.

Woodruff even had to go to a medical center later that day after experiencing contractions — describing “sharp pains,” “spasms” and even a panic attack — caused by dehydration while sitting on the prison’s concrete benches. The charges were withdrawn 18 days later.

Porcha Woodruff, 32, was seen showing six police officers at her home in the Detroit area as she prepared her two children for school on Feb. 16.

‘Mrs. Woodruff later learned she was implicated as a suspect through a photo setup shown to the robbery and carjacking victim, following a dodgy facial recognition match, the court documents read.

The lawsuit names only Detective LaShauntia Oliver, who was assigned to the original case, as a defendant.

About two and a half weeks earlier, a 25-year-old man called the police from a liquor store and claimed to have been robbed at gunpoint, according to the lawsuit.

The victim said he picked up a woman and had sex with her after drinking in his car at a BP gas station.

He dropped her off at the station ten minutes, only to discover a man with a gun taking his wallet and phone before fleeing in the victim’s Chevy Malibu.

Police arrested the man a few days later, with a woman matching the victim’s description delivering his phone to the gas station, police said.

A facial recognition search performed by independent vendor DataWorks Plus was requested by Oliver using surveillance footage.

A police report from a human crime analyst suggested Woodruff after analyzing a 2015 police photo, which she said was because he had been pulled over for driving with an expired license.

Woodruff was then identified by the victim as the woman he had been with in a series of six photos, leading to her arrest.

“Detective Oliver detailed in her report what she observed on the video footage, and there was no mention of the female suspect being pregnant,” the lawsuit states.

Woodruff, who was a month away from giving birth, thought the police were playing a prank as she was visibly pregnant at the time, but they handcuffed her.

Officers took her into custody from her home in Metro Detroit and kept her there for most of the day. She was released on $10,000 bail

It was also noted that the suspect was not provided with a photo of Woodruff for possible identification.

Woodruff spent the day in jail charged with robbery and carjacking, and was released that evening on a $100,000 personal bond, despite her and her fiancé urging officers to check the warrant to see whether the suspect was visibly pregnant, but refused.

She had to go straight to a medical center after being released and diagnosed with a low heart rate due to dehydration. Woodruff, a nursing student and certified beautician, even went into labor.

“I had contractions in the cell,” she said. “I had sharp pains in my back. I had spasms.’

“I think I probably had a panic attack. I hurt sitting on those concrete benches.’

The case was dropped by the public prosecutor on March 6 due to ‘insufficient evidence’.

“I have reviewed the allegations in the lawsuit. They are very concerning,” Detroit Police Chief James E. White said in a statement.

“We take this matter very seriously, but we cannot comment further at this time due to the need for additional investigation.”

Oliver has not responded to requests for comment.

Randal Quran Reid, 29, was falsely arrested on November 25, 2021, during a traffic stop outside of Atlanta, on two warrants for theft from Baton Rouge and Jefferson Parish in Louisiana

Nijeer Parks, 33, is suing Woodbridge Township for false imprisonment after technology was used on him

As facial recognition technology becomes more common in practice, people being wrongly identified are also becoming more common.

This is the third case involving the Detroit Police Department, which police say conducts about 125 facial recognition searches a year New York Times. Nearly all searches were conducted on black men.

Louisiana authorities’ use of facial recognition technology led to the wrongful arrest of a Georgia man on a fugitive warrant, said an attorney in a case that renews attention to racial disparities in using the digital tool.

Randall Reid, 28, was jailed on Nov. 25 in DeKalb County, Georgia, after authorities falsely identified him as a purse theft in Jefferson Parish and Baton Rouge.

In 2020, a New Jersey man filed a civil suit accusing police of falsely arresting him based solely on the software, which was later banned in the Garden State.

Nijeer Parks, 33, was held for 10 days, falsely accused of a shoplifting incident in Woodbridge in 2019, which ended when the thief rammed into a parked police car as he escaped.

Cities like San Francisco, Boston and Portland and states like New Jersey have banned police from using facial recognition technology. In Michigan, it’s considered a last resort, but it’s still legal.

HOW DOES FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY WORK?

Facial recognition software works by matching real-time images with a previous photo of a person.

Each face has about 80 unique nodes across the eyes, nose, cheeks, and mouth that distinguish one person from another.

A digital video camera measures the distance between various points on the human face, such as the width of the nose, the depth of the eye sockets, the distance between the eyes and the shape of the jawline.

This produces a unique number code that can then be linked to a matching code from a previous photo.

Facial recognition systems have drawn criticism for their mass surveillance capabilities, which raise privacy concerns, and because some studies have shown that the technology is much more likely to misidentify black and other people of color than white people, leading to wrong arrests.

The research comes amid the widespread deployment of facial recognition technology for law enforcement, airports, banks, retail and smartphones.

Failures can lead to “arresting the wrong people” and “lengthy interrogations,” according to Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union.

A National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) study conducted in 2019 found that two algorithms assigned the wrong gender to black women in 35 percent of cases.

Activists and researchers have argued that the potential for error is too great and that errors can lead to the imprisonment of innocent people.

They also claimed the technology could be used to create databases that could be hacked or used inappropriately.

The NIST study found both “false positives,” where a person is misidentified, and “false negatives,” where the algorithm fails to accurately match a face with a specific person in a database.

An expert in facial recognition software from the MIT Media Lab says this study shows that the spread of facial surveillance must be stopped to protect people.