Written by Sahithi Lingampalli Edited by Anvitha Mattipalli, Uday Lingampalli Layout by Sierra Tan Art 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 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: 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
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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, while Parks himself 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 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
