Nijeer Parks, a Black man from New Jersey, was falsely arrested and jailed for 10 days in 2019 after facial recognition software incorrectly identified him as a suspect in a hotel shoplifting incident that occurred 30 miles away.
In February 2019, Nijeer Parks was accused of shoplifting candy and attempting to hit a police officer with a car at a Hampton Inn in Woodbridge, New Jersey, despite being 30 miles away at the time. Police identified him using facial recognition software after sending a photo from a fake driver's license to state agencies with access to the technology. The next day, state investigators reported a facial recognition match to Parks, who lived in Paterson, New Jersey. A detective compared Parks's New Jersey state ID with the fake Tennessee license and agreed it was the same person. Parks spent 10 days in jail and paid around $5,000 to defend himself before the case was dismissed in November 2019 for lack of evidence. Parks is the third known person to be falsely arrested based on a flawed facial recognition match, and in all three cases, the people mistakenly identified were Black men. A 2019 national study found that facial recognition algorithms do not work as well on Black and Asian faces. Parks is now suing the police, prosecutor, and City of Woodbridge for false arrest, false imprisonment, and violation of his civil rights.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
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