What happened

Kimberlee Williams, a mother of seven working at a methadone clinic in Lawton, Oklahoma, was arrested while accompanying her daughter on a DoorDash delivery to a military base. When military police conducted a standard ID check at the base checkpoint, they discovered Williams had an outstanding arrest warrant in Maryland, detained her, and called local police, who arrested her.

The warrants stemmed from fraudulent over-the-counter bank withdrawals at several Maryland bank branches - an unknown individual had impersonated account holders and withdrawn thousands of dollars. A SunTrust bank investigator had shared the suspect's surveillance photo on CrimeDex, an online community of law enforcement and corporate investigators, and an unidentified respondent "suggested, using facial recognition software" that Williams was the suspect. Williams had never been to Maryland before.

Williams said she spent 23 days in an Oklahoma jail before an officer from Maryland arrived to transport her to a jail in Montgomery County, Maryland, where she was imprisoned for more than three months. Though Montgomery County prosecutors dropped their charges in October 2021, she still faced pending charges in two other Maryland counties, and was transferred to a jail in Prince George's County, where she spent another two months fighting charges there and in Anne Arundel County. Those cases were finally dismissed in December 2021, after she had spent a total of six months incarcerated. 

The consequences didn't end with her release: the ordeal turned her and her family's life upside down, and she lost her job because of the arrest. She continues to worry she might unknowingly attract law enforcement attention again for something she had nothing to do with. 

Why it happened

Several compounding failures allowed the error to escalate into a six-month imprisonment: 

• No corroborating investigation. None of the detectives, after receiving the bank's lead, appear to have done any further investigation for independent corroboration, relying instead on their own visual comparison. 

• Minimal information passed to police. In a memo to Montgomery County police, the bank investigator stated only that Williams was "identified... using facial recognition software"; to the other two counties, he omitted even that. It is unclear who actually ran the facial recognition search, what software was used, or what database was searched. 

• Concealment from the court. The detective assigned to the case did not disclose to the magistrate that the identification was made by facial recognition technology or that the scan had been run by an unknown website user, instead claiming the ID had been confirmed by visually comparing photos.

• Known technical weakness. Testing has repeatedly shown facial recognition systems exhibit higher rates of false matches when used on people of colour, women, older people, and young people, an established flaw regulators and vendors have not resolved.

• Structural incentive to over-trust the match: Once a name is attached to a face, confirmation bias sets in. Officers reportedly told Williams "You're telling me, but you're not telling me the truth," despite her insistence.