Nijeer Parks

Edited by: Aarav Navani, Anvitha Mattapalli & Uday Lingampalli, Blogged by Sahithi Lingampalli

Facial recognition. It can be used from anything as simple as unlocking your phone — to helping police find suspects from fake driver licenses. And in Nijeer Parks’s case, he was a suspect found from a fake driver’s license, accused of shoplifting candy and trying to hit a police officer. It was — as well as another case of facial recognition gone awry.

Nijeer Parks, a 31- year- old Black man living in Paterson, New Jersey, was arrested in February of 2019, for serious charges, including: aggravated assault, unlawful possession of weapons, using a fake ID, possession of marijuana, shoplifting, leaving the scene of a crime, resisting arrest and almost hitting a police officer with a car (General & Sarlin, 2020). After spending 11 days in the Woodbridge Police Department Jail and $5,000 to defend himself, he learned that the evidence that had him arrested was a facial recognition match from a fake ID left at a crime scene (Hill, 2020).

At the time of the crime scene, Parks was sending money to his fiancée 30 miles away and even had a photo of the receipt’s tracking ID to corroborate his story (General & Sarlin, 2020). Despite a checked-out alibi, it still took a year to drop charges and Parks received no apology.

The real man belonging to the fake ID has still not been found or identified. Nijeer Parks noticed that the man has what appeared to be earrings, and Parks doesn’t even have ear piercings. Parks believes that they don’t look alike at all and the only thing they have in common is their beard (Hill, 2020). Facial recognition, while increasing in accuracy, is extremely and significantly likely to make an error in matching faces of those with a darker skin color. A national study in 2019 of over 100 facial recognition algorithms found that there was a higher rate of false-positives for Black and Asian faces compared to white faces (Hill, 2020). Nijeer Parks isn’t the only case like this; Robert Williams and Michael Oliver are other cases of Black men being arrested due to faulty facial recognition matches.

There is currently no law against using facial recognition matches as evidence, despite actual arrests or cases based solely off these matches being extremely rare. Parks is currently suing the police, the prosecutor and the City of Woodbridge for false arrest (Hill, 2020). “‘You took being comfortable away from me. I see police, I’m automatically shaken up,’ Parks told CNN. ‘You proved to me that you can lock me up for anything, and there’s nothing I can do about it’” (General & Sarlin, 2020).

References

General, J., & Sarlin, J. (2021, April 29). A false facial recognition match sent this innocent Black man to jail. CNN. Retrieved from: Link.

Hill, K. (2020, December 29). Another Arrest, and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match. The New York Times. Retrieved from: Link. ABC7 San Francisco. (2020, December 30). Black man in New Jersey sues after false facial recognition lands him in jail. ABC7 San Francisco. Retrieved from: Link.