Amazon Named Defendant in St. Louis Rekognition False-Arrest Suit

Amazon Web Services has been added as a defendant in a lawsuit over the wrongful arrest of a St. Louis man who spent roughly two years in county jail after police built a case around a facial recognition match on a poor-quality image.

Christopher Gatlin filed an amended complaint naming AWS, arguing his arrest and indictment resulted from shoddy police work, inadequate training, misconduct, and a defective Amazon Rekognition program. Rekognition is Amazon’s cloud-based image and video analysis service; among other functions, it can compare a submitted photo against a reference database and return likely matches. The original suit, filed in January 2025 against the city of St. Louis and St. Louis County, did not name Amazon; the amendment adds the company that built the software police relied on.

The case traces back to the assault of a MetroLink security guard at a St. Louis station in December 2020. Police ran a grainy, distant image of a masked suspect through facial recognition and built their investigation around the resulting match, according to the complaint. Gatlin spent that time in the St. Louis County Jail before the case against him collapsed.

A judge has already found that Gatlin plausibly alleged reckless investigation and malicious prosecution, and allowed a municipal failure-to-train claim tied to the department’s use of facial recognition to proceed. Those claims remain against the city and county regardless of whether the new claims against Amazon survive a challenge. Wrongful-arrest claims tied to police facial recognition have reached settlements elsewhere. Bloomington, Minnesota, settled a case involving a man held five days after a facial recognition misidentification tied him to a robbery and carjacking he did not commit. The ACLU has separately tallied 14 wrongful arrests nationwide connected to the technology, most of them naming only the police department rather than the software vendor.

Amazon points to its own terms of service, which the company says prohibit police departments from using Rekognition’s face-comparison feature in criminal investigations. AWS says it does not know how the St. Louis Police Department used the software in Gatlin’s case and will investigate as the litigation proceeds.

Sources: Bloomberg Law

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By the ID Tech Editorial Team