Dillon v. City of Jacksonville Beach

In August 2024, Robert Dillon’s life was irreparably changed when police wrongfully arrested him for a crime he never committed in a city he had never been to. He was falsely accused of trying to lure a child at a fast-food restaurant in Jacksonville Beach, more than 300 miles away from his home, after police ran a grainy image of the suspect through an AI-assisted facial recognition program, which incorrectly identified him as a possible match. Mr. Dillon, a 52-year-old resident of Fort Myers, Florida, is suing the Jacksonville Beach Police Department, as well as the Jacksonville and Pinellas County Sheriff’s Offices and two individual officers, for his wrongful arrest.

Police arrested Mr. Dillon after they relied on the incorrect facial recognition technology result, let that result taint a subsequent photo lineup, and then applied for an arrest warrant while concealing information showing that Mr. Dillon could not have committed the crime he was being accused of.

Facial recognition technology is fundamentally unreliable, often misidentifying people. And as similar wrongful arrests across the country have shown, following a facial recognition technology search with a photographic lineup is a recipe for misidentifications—a false match usually looks similar to the suspect, misleading witnesses who are asked to choose between that innocent lookalike and a set of filler photos that necessarily look less like the suspect. In this case, police also omitted from the warrant application key facts, including that the suspect was a “regular” at the restaurant, yet Mr. Dillon lived five hours away and had told police he had never been to Jacksonville Beach in his life, and that an automatic license plate reader database search showed no hits on Mr. Dillon’s car anywhere near the restaurant.

Mr. Dillon is represented by the ACLU, ACLU of Florida, and the law firm of Hoguet Newman Regal & Kenney, LLP. His lawsuit seeks both monetary damages and injunctive relief, in the form of policy changes to help prevent police from wrongfully arresting other people due to reliance on facial recognition technology.