Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"Like Mr. Williams, the culprit was Black, had a thick beard and mustache, and wore his hair in braids. Physically, the two men had little else in common. Mr. Williams was not only taller, he also weighed 230 pounds. The victim said the delivery man appeared to weigh about 160 pounds. But Mr. Williams still spent more than two days in jail in April.</p><p>“In the blink of an eye, your whole life could change,” Mr. Williams said.</p><p>The algorithms that run facial recognition technology can outstrip fallible human eyewitnesses, and law enforcement agencies say the results are not decisive on their own. But the case against Mr. Williams, which was dismissed in July, illustrates the perils of a powerful investigative tool that can lead detectives far astray.</p><p>Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have found in repeated testing that facial recognition technology identifies the correct person a vast majority of the time. But that research typically involved images taken under controlled conditions, not the grainy, blurry images of surveillance footage.</p><p>Nationwide, at least 10 people have been wrongly arrested after being identified with facial recognition technology, according to news reports."</p><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/nyregion/nypd-facial-recognition-dismissed-case.html" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">nytimes.com/2025/08/26/nyregio</span><span class="invisible">n/nypd-facial-recognition-dismissed-case.html</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/USA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>USA</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/PoliceState" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>PoliceState</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Surveillance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Surveillance</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/FacialRecognition" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>FacialRecognition</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Biometrics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Biometrics</span></a></p>