Florida police hit with lawsuit after arresting a man for allegedly luring away a child – he says facial recognition falsely matched him to the suspect

A Florida man who was arrested in 2023 on suspicion of attempting to lure a child away from a Jacksonville Beach McDonald’s says he was wrongly identified through facial recognition software, according to CBS News. Richard Dillon, who says he was not at the scene, has now become the plaintiff in a new lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) against the Jacksonville Beach Police Department and others over the alleged misuse of the AI-powered technology.

According to the ACLU’s complaint, police relied on a facial recognition system to identify Dillon as a suspect without conducting a sufficient independent investigation. “Police let an error-prone artificial intelligence system stand in for an investigation,” the ACLU argues in its complaint. The case adds to a growing list of publicly known instances, more than a dozen, according to the ACLU, in which facial recognition technology has allegedly led to a wrongful arrest.

The incident that triggered the case reportedly occurred in November 2023, when police say a man approached a 12-year-old girl at a Jacksonville Beach McDonald’s and attempted to lure her away from her parents. Dillon told CBS News that about a month later, he received a phone call from Jacksonville Beach Police Officer Scott O’Connell, during which he was accused of the alleged crime.

Dillon says visible facial scars set him apart from the suspect, but police allegedly pressed on

“He accused me over and over again of a heinous crime that I knew I didn’t commit,” Dillon said. He added that he immediately thought, “My life is over. … AI says I did this, how am I going to prove that I didn’t?”

During that call, Dillon says he told police about “distinctive scars” on his face, running from his hairline to his nose, which he said were the result of skin cancer surgery. He claims that when he later saw his photo placed side by side with images of the suspect, the differences were immediately apparent. “The scars are nowhere near alike,” he told the outlet. “It absolutely blew my mind.”

Dillon says he contacted his local police department after the call, concerned he was being scammed. He claims that both his local department and the Jacksonville Beach Police told him the call was a “horrible hoax” and that it had gone “against protocol or policy.” Despite those assurances, Dillon said the uncertainty continued to weigh on him. “It haunted me for months … thinking at any time the police could show up here and arrest me for a crime that I didn’t commit,” he said.

Eight months after that initial phone call, a Lee County sheriff’s deputy reportedly arrested Dillon at his home. According to his lawsuit, he was held overnight in jail and was “forced to borrow money and pledge the title to his truck to post bond.” All charges against him were reportedly dropped about two months after his arrest. 

The facial recognition system that identified Dillon is apparently called the Face Analysis Comparison and Examination System, or FACESNXT. According to the lawsuit, Officer David Cohill took cellphone photos of the suspect by photographing a computer screen that was displaying surveillance footage of the incident. Those photos were then run through FACESNXT by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, which allegedly returned a “93% match on facial features” to Dillon.

A 2015 FACESNXT training presentation, cited in the lawsuit, warned that “off axis” framing and “non-uniform lighting” in photos could produce poor-quality samples for the software. Dillon alleges in his lawsuit that the images used to identify him were “partially shadowed and off-axis.”

Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told CBS News that makers of such technology and other law enforcement agencies have clarified that facial recognition software “does not and cannot produce matches.” 

Rather, he said, it produces a candidate list of possible leads, which law enforcement is expected to follow up on with their own independent investigation. Wessler said Dillon’s arrest is proof that “this technology is fundamentally dangerous.” Dillon’s case is among a growing number of cases where AI caused real-world harm to individuals who had no recourse against it.

The lawsuit further alleges that Jacksonville Beach police never “presented any photographs to the victim.” Instead, according to the complaint, a photo lineup was conducted with a McDonald’s employee who was not an eyewitness to the alleged interaction between the suspect and the child.

Dillon also said that he hopes his case will help others avoid a similar experience. “I’m hoping that the outcome of this is to prevent other people from going through the trauma that I went through.” He said the experience has had a lasting effect on his everyday life, saying, “Now every time I go somewhere and I want to interact with a kid, I think to myself, don’t do it. There’s cameras. It’s ruined my life as far as being able to interact with children.”