Detroit Woman Sues Police Department After Faulty Facial Recognition Leads To Unjust Arrest

LaDonna Crutchfield, a Black woman, is suing the police over a wrongful arrest she says is due to faulty facial recognition.

LaDonna Crutchfield, a 37-year-old Black woman, recently filed a federal complaint against the Detroit Police Department in connection with a 2024 arrest she says was carried out on false pretenses due to the department’s use of facial identification software.

According to NBC News, Crutchfield was removed from her home by police who subsequently accused her of being their central suspect in an attempted murder case, and per the lawsuit, “was identified as a suspect by an unknown facial recognition database.”

Ivan Land, Crutchfield’s lawyer, told NBC News on Feb. 28 that police investigators knew the name of their suspect, which meant that Crutchfield should never have been a suspect to begin with. In addition, Crutchfield is five inches shorter and several years younger than that suspect, which should have further eliminated Crutchfield.

The police, meanwhile, claim that they never used facial recognition technology to identify Crutchfield as the suspect, instead, they essentially made a case that they arrived at that conclusion through rushed and shoddy detective work.

According to Detroit Police Assistant Chief Charles Fitzgerald, police initially linked Crutchfield to the crime via a partial license plate of the shooter, this, according to Land, was later linked to a house where one of her relatives used to live, which led to a picture of Crutchfield, which Fitzgerald said presented circumstantial evidence that Crutchfield could have been the shooter.

“The plate also had that there was this woman (the actual suspect) who had a young kid with them in the car,” Fitzgerald said. “She (Crutchfield) has a young child. But unfortunately they didn’t go just deep enough to look to see that it’s also connected to another female that fits the description who has since been charged with this case.”

Following her release from police custody, which required Crutchfield to be fingerprinted and give a DNA sample, she returned to get a detective letter stating she was in fact, not a suspect, to present to her jobs out of fear she would be fired from them for getting arrested.

“Ms. Crutchfield was required to appear for an interview held at the Detroit Detention Center,” Detective Marc Thompson wrote in a letter which is also included in Crutchfield’s lawsuit. “However I am able to declare Ms. Crutchfield is not the subject involved in this criminal investigation.”

Crutchfield’s lawsuit does not name a dollar amount for damages, but she indicates in the lawsuit that she is traumatized by her experience.

The Detroit Police either “knew or should have known that their conduct would cause severe emotional distress to” Crutchfield, “especially in light of the public nature of the arrest and the presence of her children and neighbors,” the lawsuit states.

In 2020, Tawana Petty, the director of the Data Justice Program at Detroit Community Technology Project and the co-lead of the Our Data Bodies Project wrote an op-ed for Wired, indicating that facial recognition technology presented a clear and present danger to Black Americans.

As Vice reported in 2020, Detroit Police Chief James Craig said that the technology the department employed at the time was so faulty, their own policy advised them not to take what it produced at face value.

As Petty cautioned in her piece, this variation on hypersurveillance is no good for Black people in general, but is of particular malice to Black Americans in Detroit. More recent incidents in Detroit, like those of Crutchfield, prove just how right her warning was.

“We see the videos of the people police hurt and kill—but the surveillance that led to that brutality is often hidden from us. Surveillance is the foundation of modern policing. It has ties to a long racist legacy, from the branding of enslaved people to the Lantern Laws of the 18th century. Police and politicians defend these programs by claiming they are intended to keep people safe. But for Black people, surveillance ain’t safety,” Petty wrote.