Kimberlee Williams Wrongful Arrest

On June 23, 2021, Kimberlee Williams was accompanying one of her daughters on a DoorDash delivery to a local military base in Lawton, Oklahoma, when she was arrested on charges of fraudulent over-the-counter bank withdrawals in Maryland—a state she had never been to. Maryland police had obtained an arrest warrant for Ms. Williams after facial recognition technology (“FRT”) flagged her as a possible match to an image of the suspect taken from bank security camera footage. Ms. Williams spent a total of six months in jail because police let a faulty result from a computer algorithm taint their investigation. The ACLU is now filing complaints with three police departments in Maryland on her behalf.

After an unknown individual had made the fraudulent withdrawals from several Maryland bank branches, a bank investigator submitted a picture of the suspect to a national listserv of police and private investigators called Crimedex. Someone on the listserv ran the suspect’s image through FRT and a responded to the investigator flagging Ms. Williams as a purported match. The bank shared the result with detectives from three Maryland counties (Montgomery County, Anne Arundel County, and Prince George’s County), but provided little to no information on why Ms. Williams was believed to be the suspect. In a memo to Montgomery County police, the bank investigator stated only that Ms. Williams was “identified . . . using facial recognition software.” To the other two counties, the bank investigator omitted even that.

It appears that none of the detectives, after receiving the bank’s lead, did any further investigation for independent corroboration, relying instead on only their own visual comparisons of photos of Ms. Williams and photos of the suspect. But this kind of “verification” is worthless; it merely confirms that the technology did what it is designed to do: find someone who looks similar to the suspect, but is often innocent. The detectives paid no attention to the fact that Ms. Williams had no ties to Maryland—she had lived in Oklahoma and Ohio, and was in Oklahoma at the time of the crimes. Although prosecutors eventually dropped all the charges against Ms. Williams, this ordeal took a significant toll, with serious consequences for her mental and physical health to this day.

In its administrative complaints, the ACLU is demanding that police departments in Montgomery County, Prince George’s County, and Anne Arundel County publicly apologize to Ms. Williams for what they put her through and undertake serious policy reforms to prevent this from happening again. The proposed reforms include prohibitions on relying on facial recognition technology searches conducted by outside entities and bans from making arrests based only on face recognition results followed by human identifications.