A Detroit woman is suing the city after she was falsely arrested due to faulty facial recognition technology used by police while she was eight months pregnant, according to a new lawsuit, CBS News reports.
Porcha Woodruff says she was getting her kids ready for school on the morning of February 16 when six Detroit officers showed up at he house.
The mom of three said she thought police were joking when they showed up to take her into custody on charges of robbery and carjacking, according to court documents filed in US District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan. “Are you kidding, carjacking? Do you see that I am eight months pregnant,” Woodruff said to one officer who told her she had a warrant for her arrest, the lawsuit alleges, according to CBS News.
According to court filings, Woodruff later learned she was being “implicated as a suspect” via a photo lineup provided to the victim following an “unreliable facial recognition match” in a robbery and carjacking case.
The robbery victim told police that on Jan. 29, he was with a woman with whom he had sexual intercourse. He said that they traveled to a BP gas station at some point throughout the day, where the woman “interacted with several individuals,” according to the lawsuit.
They then left for another location, where the victim was robbed and carjacked at gunpoint by a man with whom the woman had interacted earlier at the BP gas station. The victim told police his phone was returned to the gas station a few days later.
Detective LaShauntia Oliver, who was assigned to the case, is named as a defendant in the lawsuit. It alleges that when Oliver learned that a woman had returned the victim’s phone to the gas station, she ran facial technology on the video, which identified her as Woodruff.
“Detective Oliver stated in detail in her report what she observed in the video footage, and there was no mention of the female suspect being pregnant,” the lawsuit says.
According to court documents, when a man was arrested for driving the victim’s car on Feb. 2, Oliver did not show him a picture of Woodruff. The victim was also given a lineup of possible suspects and identified Woodruff as the woman he was with during the robbery. According to the lawsuit, Oliver used an old picture of Woodruff in the lineup from an expired tags arrest in 2015, despite having access to her current driver’s license.
According to the lawsuit, on the day Woodruff was arrested, she and her fiancé pushed officers to check the warrant to see if the lady who committed the crime was pregnant, which they refused to do.
Detroit officers Chief James White told NBC News that the claims are “very concerning” and that officers are taking the situation “very seriously,” but that he couldn’t provide any additional details for the time being.
“We will provide further information once additional facts are obtained and we have a better understanding of the circumstances,” he said.
Woodruff’s attorney, Ivan Land, believes police should have done “more investigating instead of relying on facial recognition identification.”