Sheriff says facial recognition not a factor in false arrest
The Hennepin County Sheriff's Office is pushing back on claims that facial recognition technology led to a man's false arrest.
Kylese Perryman, 21, filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the city of Bloomington and Hennepin County over his 2021 arrest and prosecution for a carjacking and subsequent armed robbery that he did not commit.
Perryman alleges that authorities failed to conduct a basic investigation that would have proven that he was working the night shift at a Target warehouse at the time of the carjacking, and was nowhere near the Mall of America parking ramp where several women were robbed at gunpoint the next day.
In the civil rights complaint that ACLU attorneys filed in U.S. District Court, Perryman also claims that investigators using a facial recognition system falsely matched his photo with security camera images of another young Black man.
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Sheriff Dawanna Witt, who took office in January and was not in charge of the department at the time of the investigation, said Friday that detectives did not use facial recognition technology in the case, and in general it's only used to generate investigative leads.
“Facial recognition is not used by the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office as a sole source for positive identification or probable cause to arrest,” Witt said in a statement.
In response, Claire Barlow, one of Perryman's attorneys, said that county officials have been “deliberately vague” about whether facial recognition was used during the investigation.
Barlow said that when prosecutors dropped the charges against Perryman and moved to have them expunged from his record, they wrote in a letter to a judge that Perryman had been mistakenly identified by facial recognition software.
“The lawsuit will help us determine which story as to the means of identification is true,” Barlow said in a statement. ”Regardless of which facial recognition technique was used — software, human review, or some combination of the two — the city and county law enforcement completely failed to then take even basic investigative steps like considering height, weight, and tattoos, which would have ruled Mr. Perryman out. They also failed to do a lineup, follow up with witnesses, or check Mr. Perryman’s alibis that show he was nowhere near the crimes. Instead, they arrested, charged and jailed an innocent man.”