ACLU Says 14 Wrongful Arrests Now Tied to Police Facial Recognition

The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Maryland say that publicly documented wrongful arrests in the United States caused by police reliance on facial recognition technology have now reached 14, citing the case of Kimberlee Williams as the latest example. The statement, authored by ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project deputy director Nathan Freed Wessler and William J. Brennan fellow Lauren Yu, called for police departments to apologize and for lawmakers to impose binding restrictions.

Williams, an Oklahoma grandmother, was arrested on June 23, 2021, at a military base checkpoint in Lawton during a DoorDash delivery. The arrest was executed on a Maryland warrant tied to fraudulent bank withdrawals at SunTrust and Truist branches between December 2019 and January 2020. Williams had never been to Maryland and had geotagged social media posts placing her in Oklahoma during the disputed period. A bank investigator had submitted the suspect image to the Crimedex listserv, where a facial recognition query surfaced Williams as a candidate. Police did not independently corroborate the identification before executing the warrant.

Williams was incarcerated for approximately six months. Montgomery County charges were dropped in October 2021, with the remaining Prince George’s and Anne Arundel County charges dismissed in December 2021. She lost her job during the incarceration and was released without her phone or money. The ACLU said the pattern in the Williams case, in which a facial recognition query produced a candidate image that was then treated as an identification without independent verification, is consistent with other wrongful arrest cases the group has tracked.

The count of 14 covers publicly documented cases spanning February 2019 through August 2025. The ACLU has called for binding policy limits rather than voluntary department-level guidelines, arguing that the Williams case and comparable incidents reflect a systemic problem with how facial recognition outputs are treated in warrant applications and charging decisions. The group sent letters to three Maryland police departments demanding public apologies and specifically condemned the concealment of facial recognition reliance from courts during warrant review.

The statement lands in a policy environment where individual departments have been updating their own procedures in response to settlements. Detroit Police changed its facial recognition technology policies after a wrongful arrest settlement, and an advocacy group sued San Francisco over allegedly illegal use of facial recognition in law enforcement investigations. The ACLU’s position is that incremental reforms at the department level are not sufficient without legislative guardrails on police use of commercial facial recognition tools.

Sources: ACLU

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By Cass Kennedy