He wasn't arrested until the shop owner had also "identified" him. The cops used a single frame of grainy video to pull his driver's license photo, and then put that photo in a lineup and showed the store clerk.
The store clerk (who hadn't witnessed the crime and was going off the same frame of video fed into the facial recognition software) said the driver's license photo was a match.
There are several problems with the conduct of the police in this story but IMHO the use of facial recognition is not the most egregious.
The story is the same one that all anti-surveillance, anti-police militarization, pro-privacy, and anti-authoritarian people foretell. Good technology will be used enable, amplify, and justify civil rights abuses by authority figures from your local beat cop, to a faceless corporation, a milquetoast public servant, or the president of the United States.
Our institutions and systems (and maybe humans in general) are not robust enough to cleanly handle these powers, and we are making the same mistake over and over and over again.
Correct, and this has been the story with every piece of technology or tool we've ever given to police. We give them body cameras and they're turned off or used to create FPS-style snuff films of gunned down citizens. Give them rubber bullets and they're aimed at protesters eyeballs. Give them tasers and they're used as an excuse to shoot someone when the suspect "resists." Give them flashbangs and they'll throw them into an infant's crib. Give them mace and it's used out of car windows to punish journalists for standing on the sidewalks.
The mistake is to treat any police department as a good-faith participant in the goal of reducing police violence. Any tool you give them will be used to brutalize. The only solution is to give them less.
"The Shinola shoplifting occurred in October 2018. Katherine Johnston, an investigator at Mackinac Partners, a loss prevention firm, reviewed the store’s surveillance video and sent a copy to the Detroit police"
"In this case, however, according to the Detroit police report, investigators simply included Mr. Williams’s picture in a “6-pack photo lineup” they created and showed to Ms. Johnston, Shinola’s loss-prevention contractor, and she identified him. (Ms. Johnston declined to comment.)"
I think you're correct that the person was not an owner or clerk. IMHO the salient point is that the person was not any sort of eyewitness but merely comparing the same grainy photo as the algorithm.
More importantly, the person wasn't an eyewitness, and the 6-pack photo array was window dressing to make the outside technician appear to be an eyewitness.
Yes, this is a story of police misconduct. The regulation of facial recognition that is required is regulation against police/authority stupidity. The FR system aids in throwing away misses, leaving investigative leads. But if a criminal is not in the FR database to begin with, any results of the FR are wastes of time.
The store clerk (who hadn't witnessed the crime and was going off the same frame of video fed into the facial recognition software) said the driver's license photo was a match.
There are several problems with the conduct of the police in this story but IMHO the use of facial recognition is not the most egregious.