Incident 592: Facial Recognition Misidentifies Pregnant Woman Leading to False Arrest in Detroit
Description: Porcha Woodruff was arrested and subsequently had charges dropped due to an unreliable facial recognition match. Despite being visibly pregnant, she was implicated in a robbery and carjacking based on an outdated photo used in a lineup.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: unknown developed an AI system deployed by Detroit Police Department, which harmed Porcha Woodruff.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
592
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2023-02-16
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline

nbcnews.com · 2023
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A Detroit woman is suing the city and a police detective after she was falsely arrested because of facial recognition technology while she was eight months pregnant, according to court documents.
Porcha Woodruff, 32, was getting her two chi…

theguardian.com · 2023
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Porcha Woodruff was eight months pregnant when police in Detroit, Michigan came to arrest her on charges of carjacking and robbery. She was getting her two children ready for school when six police officers knocked on her door and presented…
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
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