When Kimberlee Williams accompanied her daughter to an Oklahoma military base in 2021, security officers learned that she was wanted for bank fraud in Maryland.
Facial-recognition software had concluded Williams was the person responsible for impersonating individuals in Maryland and withdrawing thousands of dollars from their bank accounts. So she was taken into custody and held in an Oklahoma jail for 23 days — and then spent months more behind bars in Maryland.
But Williams had never been to Maryland before her arrest.
And she wasn’t the person the facial-recognition program thought she was.
Now Williams is demanding an apology from police, as well as reforms to prevent others from being wrongly identified in criminal cases.
Williams’ ordeal illustrates the flaws in commonly used facial-recognition technology — and, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, the mistaken belief by many law enforcement agencies that a match in the technology indisputably verifies a person is a wanted criminal.
“But this kind of ‘verification’ is worthless,” the ACLU and its Maryland chapter said in letters sent Tuesday to three Maryland police departments on Williams’ behalf. “It merely confirms that the technology did what it is designed to do: find someone who looks similar to the suspect, but is often innocent.”
Mistaken identity
Williams was riding along with her daughter, a DoorDash driver, for a delivery to Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma, when security officers performed a routine ID check before allowing the women onto the base.
The check revealed a warrant for Williams’ arrest, based on an image of a suspect that a bank investigator had uploaded to an electronic mailing list tool used by law enforcement and private investigators. An individual who saw the image ran it through facial recognition software, which falsely flagged Williams as the culprit.
After more than three weeks in a local jail in Oklahoma, Williams was transferred to Maryland — a state that, as she told the police, she had never before visited.
There, according to the ACLU, the Montgomery County police obtained an arrest warrant for Williams, despite making no attempt to verify the technology’s accuracy. Not only that, the ACLU said, the police did not disclose the use of facial recognition when asking a judge for the warrant.
Once the Montgomery County police determined their mistake, the charges against Williams were dropped in their jurisdiction. But charges remained in two other Maryland counties: Prince George’s and Anne Arundel. Williams spent an additional two months in a jail in Prince George’s County before being cleared.
All in all, Williams spent six months in jail for crimes someone else committed.
“I lost six months of my life when Maryland police wrongfully imprisoned me halfway across the country from my children, my home, and my job, all because they relied on an incorrect result from faulty technology,” Williams said in an ACLU press release. “I had never even been to Maryland before I was flown there in handcuffs, for a crime I had nothing to do with. My family and I can’t get that time back, but I hope my experience will be a warning to police in Maryland and across the country that this technology can ruin lives. No family deserves to go through that.”
‘These abuses must end’
Lauren Yu, a legal fellow with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, says Williams is one of 14 people known to have been arrested over an inaccurate facial-recognition alert.
“These Maryland police departments owe it to Ms. Williams to make amends and to take serious steps to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else,” Yu said. “And police across the country are on notice: face recognition technology is hurting people, and these abuses must end.”
In a statement to The Washington Post, the Anne Arundel County police said it “independently investigates and corroborates any outside tips and leads it receives before applying for criminal charges.”
“An independent judicial officer — a District Court Commissioner — reviews and evaluates all criminal charges for probable cause to determine whether charges should be issued,” the department said.
Police in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
Seeking an apology — and reforms
This was not Williams’ first time behind bars. She spent about two years in prison after pleading guilty in 2010 to felony charges of writing bogus checks and conspiracy. Earlier, in 2001 and 2004, she pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges involving bad checks.
Williams has not filed a lawsuit against the Maryland police departments. A statute of limitations may prevent legal action at this point.
But she and the ACLU are asking the departments to issue a public apology — and to “investigate the failures that led to her wrongful arrest and imprisonment.”
“Reforms must include prohibiting police from relying on facial recognition technology searches conducted by outside entities, as well as banning police from making arrests based only on face recognition results followed by human identifications, which are tainted when face recognition technology makes a false match to an innocent person who looks similar to the suspect,” the ACLU said.