SurveillanceHigh
New York Detective Reportedly Misused Woody Harrelson's Face to Perform Face Recognition Search
- Occurred
- Apr 28, 2017
- Published
- May 16, 2019
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
When the facial recognition search for a CVS theft suspect's face returned no useful matches due to the surveillance footage being obscured and highly pixelated, a New York City police detective continued the face search using Woody Harrelson's face allegedly due to his resemblance to the suspect's face, eventually leading to the arrest of an unknown victim.
Developers
- Unknown
Deployers
- New York Police Department
- Facial Identification Section
- Law enforcement
Harmed parties
- Unknown
- Woody Harrelson
Classification
Category confidence: 95%
Severity confidence: 90%
Rationale: Police misuse of facial recognition technology led to wrongful arrest, constituting a serious civil rights violation.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8