A Detroit woman has filed a federal lawsuit against the city and several police officers, alleging she was wrongfully arrested in front of her children and jailed based on a false match using facial recognition technology.
The lawsuit, filed last week in U.S. District Court, accuses Detroit police of violating the constitutional rights of 36-year-old LaDonna Crutchfield, a mother of three who was arrested at her home on Jan. 23, 2024, without a warrant. Crutchfield was held on an attempted murder charge despite no evidence linking her to the crime.
According to the complaint, officers falsely claimed to have a warrant, placed her in handcuffs, and transported her to the Detroit Detention Center, where she was questioned and told she had been identified through facial recognition technology.
If true, Crutchfield is at least the fourth person to be charged based on a false recognition match by Detroit police.
But Detroit police deny using facial recognition technology in Crutchfield’s case.
“I don’t know where our complainant got this information,” Detroit police Asst. Chief Charles Fitzgerald told reporters Tuesday. “It’s factually incorrect.”
Fitzgerald said “another person that matches her description” has since been charged.
Crutchfield, who also cares for her niece, was at home reading to her 5-year-old daughter when six cops arrived. Her niece answered the door and was told police were looking for Crutchfield, who was ordered to step outside barefoot, according to the lawsuit. Officers refused to tell her why she was being arrested.
The officers “engaged in extreme and outrageous conduct by arresting [Crutchfield] without probable cause, falsely accusing her of assault with attempt to murder, and misrepresenting the existence of a search warrant,” the lawsuit, filed by attorney Ivan Land, states.
Crutchfield was later allegedly told she was a suspect in an attempted murder case because of a recognition match. The lawsuit alleges the detective in charge failed to conduct an investigation before arresting her. When shown photos of the actual suspect, Crutchfield denied any involvement, pointing out that the woman in her image was not her. A detective later admitted she should not have been arrested, and she was released that evening after being forced to provide fingerprints and a DNA sample, according to the lawsuit.
Detroit police have faced mounting criticism over their use of facial recognition technology, which studies have shown disproportionately misidentifies Black individuals. Nationwide, at least seven people have reported being falsely arrested based on flawed facial recognition matches. All have been Black.
Four of those cases were in Detroit.
In February 2022, Porcha Woodruff was eight months pregnant when six cops arrested her at her home in Detroit based on a false facial recognition match. She spent 11 hours at the Detroit Detention Center and was charged with robbery and carjacking. A month later, the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office dismissed the case.
Robert Williams was arrested at his Farmington Hills home in front of his wife and young daughters in January 2020 based on a false facial recognition match. He was locked up for 30 hours in an overcrowded detention facility where he was forced to sleep on a cement floor.
The technology also misidentified Michael Oliver in July 2019. Oliver was arrested and falsely accused of stealing a teacher’s cellphone and throwing it. He also filed a lawsuit against the city.
In June 2024, civil rights activists announced they had reached a “groundbreaking settlement agreement” in connection with Williams’s lawsuit, which alleged the police department violated his Fourth Amendment rights and that his wrongful arrest was in violation of the Michigan Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act. As part of the settlement, Detroit police are prohibited from making arrests based solely on facial recognition results or conducting phone lineups without independent and reliable evidence linking a suspect to a crime. The agreement also bans the use of facial recognition leads as the primary basis for lineups, requires police training on the risks and biases of the technology, and mandates an audit of all cases in which facial recognition was used to obtain an arrest warrant since 2017.
Crutchfield’s lawsuit seeks unspecified damages for false arrest, imprisonment, emotional distress, and violations of Crutchfield’s civil rights.
The defendants in the suit are officers Marc Thompson, Anthony Williams, Dorian Hardy, Jeremy Morrow, Joshua Holder, Matthew McKinney and “Jane Doe,” an unknown cop. The city of Detroit is also a defendant.
