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AI match leads to suit
A Florida man, Robert Dillon, is suing the Jacksonville Beach Police Department and others after he was wrongfully arrested in a 2023 child-luring investigation that police say began when a man approached a 12-year-old in a McDonald's in Jacksonville Beach, Florida.
“A man suing Florida police alleges that cops relied on a faulty facial recognition match and concealed exculpatory evidence when they arrested him on a charge of attempting to lure a child in August 2024”
CBS News reported that Dillon was later cleared and that on Wednesday he became a plaintiff in a new ACLU lawsuit over what he believes was misuse of AI-driven image matching technology, with Dillon saying, "Police let an error-prone artificial intelligence system stand in for an investigation."
CBS News also said the key evidence police used to puncture his alibi was facial recognition software that matched an image of the suspect to Dillon's photo, and that the episode began in November 2023.
The lawsuit described the match as a "93% match on facial features" produced by the Face Analysis Comparison and Examination System, or FACESNXT, after Officer David Cohill took cellphone photos of the suspect from a computer screen displaying surveillance footage.
Wired later described the system as returning a "93 percent match on facial features" and said the scores represent how much two images look alike to the algorithm, not how likely they show the same person.
Officials dispute probable cause
In the ACLU lawsuit, Dillon alleges police concealed evidence and treated algorithmic output as a near-certain identification, while the Guardian reported that the case was dismissed and charges dropped last year over the August 2024 incident.
The Guardian quoted the ACLU saying, "Mr Dillon was arrested at his home in front of his wife," and described months of criminal prosecution and a mugshot that remained accessible online after charges were dropped.
Wired reported that Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters told Action News Jax after the case was dropped that a face-recognition hit alone would not constitute probable cause, saying, "If you came to me with a facial-recognition hit and that was your probable cause, I would probably kick you out of my office."
CBS News said Jacksonville Beach police and the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office both declined to comment, while Dillon told CBS News he remembered thinking, "my life is over. … AI says I did this, how am I going to prove that I didn't?"
The suit also alleges that the arrest warrant was based on a low-definition, poor-quality screen grab of security footage taken on an officer’s cellphone rather than a digital upload from the recording itself, according to the Guardian.
What’s at stake next
Dillon’s lawsuit seeks damages and policy changes after he says the arrest and prosecution left him traumatized and no longer comfortable being friendly to children, with Wired reporting that strangers approach him in public to ask about the case.
“When police arrested Richard Dillon in 2023 for allegedly trying to "lure a child" away from a McDonald's in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, he told them he was more than 300 miles away at the time of the crime”
Wired said the suit asks a court to order all three agencies to overhaul their face-recognition policies, and it named the City of Jacksonville Beach, the Jacksonville Sheriff, and the Pinellas County Sheriff in their official capacities.
The Guardian reported that the lawsuit alleges the investigating officer omitted "multiple categories of readily verifiable exculpatory evidence" from the arrest affidavit and that license plate readers showed none of Dillon’s vehicles were ever near the restaurant.
CBS News said Dillon was held overnight in jail and, according to his lawsuit, was "forced to borrow money and pledge the title to his truck to post bond," before charges were dropped about two months later.
In the complaint, the ACLU framed the case as a test of safeguards, with Dillon saying, "Over a year later, I'm still picking up the pieces of my life, all because the police relied on this dangerous technology instead of doing their jobs and actually investigating," while the Guardian said the ACLU called for amends and steps to prevent similar errors.
