Wrongful arrest

The city of Bloomington reached a settlement on Tuesday after claims that its officers incorrectly identified and jailed a man in 2021. The Minnesota Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union said the city agreed to settle a lawsuit over the wrongful arrest of Kylese Perryman. Bloomington agreed to pay Perryman monetary damages and change police training and policy. As part of the settlement, Bloomington agreed to adopt a procedure incorporating the KOPS alert guidelines contained in the BCA’s Minnesota Criminal Justice Information System Operating Manual, and to adopt a procedure stating that police officers are prohibited from issuing KOPS alerts as arrest warrants.

On September 15, 2026, Angela Lipps filed a federal lawsuit against the City of Fargo and Detective Lucas Heck, seeking $10 million in damages. The complaint alleges Heck relied on a flawed facial recognition match and ignored exculpatory evidence to bring bank fraud charges, leading to her arrest at gunpoint and detention for nearly six months. The charges were dismissed in December 2025 after bank records showed she was in Tennessee during the thefts. The suit says Fargo lacked policies governing facial recognition use at the time.

Lindsey has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against two Florida Highway Patrol troopers, alleging false arrest, wrongful imprisonment, and malicious prosecution. The lawsuit follows an arrest tied to a Flock license plate camera hit. The State Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute all eight charges on May 22, 2026. Her complaint describes the Flock evidence as exculpatory, not inculpatory.

Two San Diego men, Hugo Parra and Ariel Alonso Beltran, filed a lawsuit against the city alleging officers used Flock automated license plate reader data to arrest them for a crime they did not commit. The men were arrested on November 26 after a Flock hit matched their red Alfa Romeo to a suspect vehicle. Charges were later dropped. The lawsuit alleges false arrest, negligence, unreasonable detention, and failure to investigate.

Bloomington, Minnesota, settled a wrongful-arrest lawsuit brought by Kylese Perryman, who spent five days in jail after police incorrectly identified him as a suspect in a 2021 robbery and carjacking investigation. The agreement resolves remaining claims against the city and requires changes to how Bloomington alerts other law enforcement agencies about suspects; Perryman will receive a payment under the settlement. Hennepin County separately paid Perryman $10,000 in 2024. Charges were dismissed 52 days after his arrest, following five days in jail and 30 days on electronic home monitoring. The ACLU of Minnesota represented Perryman. The lawsuit alleged that police treated the facial recognition software result as an identification without completing basic corroborating work, despite evidence such as home surveillance footage and the absence of tattoos on the person recorded at Walmart.

Amazon Web Services was added as a defendant in a federal lawsuit filed by Christopher Gatlin, who spent 17 months in jail after St. Louis police used Amazon Rekognition on a grainy, blurry image of a masked suspect. The amended complaint, filed August 13, 2026, alleges poor police work, inadequate training, misconduct and a defective facial recognition system. AWS said its terms of service prohibit police use of Rekognition’s face comparison feature in criminal investigations.

Eva Pizzarelli filed a federal lawsuit in June 2026 alleging Cumberland, Rhode Island police wrongfully arrested and prosecuted her after an officer used a Flock Safety license-plate camera photo to identify her as the driver of a fleeing vehicle. The suit says the camera captured a photo of a person inside the vehicle, not just a license plate. Pizzarelli was arrested April 8, 2025, held over six hours, and charged with reckless driving and eluding police. Charges were later dismissed. She seeks $750,000 in damages. The ACLU of Rhode Island has urged the town to end its Flock contract.

On 22 May 2026, prosecutors declined to prosecute Lindsey Brooke Isaacs on all eight charges, including three counts of vehicular homicide, after a second review found no collision damage on her black Dodge Durango. She had been arrested on 17 April 2026 after a Flock Safety license-plate reader placed her vehicle three miles from a fatal crash on Interstate 4. Witnesses described a maroon Durango. Isaacs spent 13 days in jail and has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against two Florida Highway Patrol troopers. Flock Safety said its cameras “provide investigative leads; they do not identify perpetrators.” Isaacs said investigators misinterpreted the footage.

On April 17, 2026, the Florida Highway Patrol arrested Lindsey Isaacs, 23, on eight felony charges, including three counts of vehicular homicide, for an October 4, 2025 hit-and-run on I-4 that killed three people. A Flock camera had recorded her black Dodge Durango about three miles from the crash. A 911 caller had described a maroon Durango and gave a partial plate that did not match hers, and the struck vehicle bore maroon paint. She spent 13 days in jail. Prosecutors dropped the charges on May 22, 2026, the same day investigators arrested another driver whose maroon Durango had been repaired after the crash. Isaacs filed a federal lawsuit against FHP and two sergeants, alleging they claimed her undamaged vehicle showed crash damage and ignored evidence that would have cleared her. No settlement is reported.

On March 4, 2026 Chicago agreed to pay $500,000 to Michael Williams, who was charged with murder in 2020 after prosecutors used audio from ShotSpotter sensors as key evidence that he had shot a man inside his car. Williams spent nearly a year in jail before a judge dismissed the case at prosecutors’ request for insufficient evidence. His federal lawsuit, brought with the MacArthur Justice Center, alleged police misused the technology. The city’s Law Department said the payment resolved the case before trial and included no admission that the city was legally at fault. SoundThinking issued a statement the same day saying the company’s data had helped clear Williams.

In March 2026, Fargo Police Chief Dave Zibolski told reporters that the department identified ‘a couple of errors’ in an investigation into bank thefts that led to the wrongful arrest of Angela Lipps. West Fargo police used AI facial recognition to identify Lipps based on a photo from a fake ID used by the suspect. Zibolski said use of the West Fargo AI facial recognition system would not have been allowed and has since been prohibited. He said the department would take ‘more steps’ and ‘more scrutiny’ in future cases.

In July 2025, US marshals arrested Angela Lipps at her home in Tennessee while she was babysitting. She was held for nearly four months without bail, then extradited to North Dakota and charged with four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft. The charges were dropped after her lawyer provided bank records showing she was in Tennessee at the time of the fraud. The complaint alleges a Fargo police investigator used AI facial recognition software that returned Lipps’s social media photo as a lead. The detective requested an arrest warrant despite Lipps not resembling the suspect and having never been to North Dakota. The lawsuit seeks $10m in damages.

Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joe Lopinto’s office agreed to pay $200,000 to settle a civil rights lawsuit filed by Randal Quran Reid, who was jailed for six days in 2022 after a facial recognition match wrongly identified him. The payout was approved at a May 13 hearing in federal court in New Orleans and sealed. Reid’s arrest stemmed from a warrant that relied on a Clearview AI match that JPSO detectives failed to verify. JPSO rescinded the warrants after Reid’s attorney pointed out physical differences. The settlement does not include an admission of fault.

In May 2025, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office agreed to pay $200,000 to settle a federal civil rights suit by Randal Reid, with the payment finalized in federal court in New Orleans. Reid was stopped by DeKalb County police outside Atlanta the day after Thanksgiving 2022 on warrants from Jefferson and East Baton Rouge parishes accusing him of using stolen credit cards to buy about $15,000 in designer purses. He had never been to Louisiana and spent six days in jail before the warrants were withdrawn. According to the suit, the sole basis for identifying him was a Clearview AI facial-recognition match run by a sheriff’s detective; the office had awarded Clearview a $25,000 contract in 2019. The arrest affidavit did not mention facial recognition, citing only ‘a credible source.’ The suit alleged the office had no formal policy or training on the technology despite using it since at least 2019.

A New Jersey man agreed to a $300,000 settlement of his federal lawsuit after being wrongly imprisoned for 10 days due to a facial recognition misidentification. The suit concerned the Woodbridge police department’s use of facial recognition technology. Attorney Sexton compared the department’s handling to early GPS users who drove off a cliff, saying, ‘It was like this magic thing. You’re kind of bewitched by the technology.’

On June 28, 2024 the City of Detroit and Robert Williams formalized a settlement of Williams v. City of Detroit, the ACLU-backed suit over his January 2020 arrest. Detroit police had matched his driver’s licence photo to security video of a 2018 shoplifting at a Shinola store; he was arrested outside his home in front of his family and held for about 30 hours. His case was the first publicly reported wrongful arrest attributed to a false face-recognition match. The city agreed to pay $300,000. Under the court-enforceable agreement, Detroit police may no longer arrest anyone solely on a face-recognition result or on a photo lineup built from one; a match may serve only as a lead requiring independent corroboration. The department must also review cases from 2017 to 2023 in which the technology was used and notify prosecutors of any arrest made without independent evidence. The ACLU called it the strongest police policy on the technology in the country.

In April 2024, a Flock camera in Toledo misread the number “7” on Brandon Upchurch’s license plate as “2”, matching it to a stolen vehicle. Police stopped Upchurch and deployed a dog, which mauled him. He was arrested and later released. Charges of obstructing official business and resisting arrest were dismissed. Upchurch filed a civil lawsuit and settled for $35,000 with no admission of wrongdoing.

In July 2023, the city of Charlotte paid $10,000 to settle a wrongful arrest claim from a woman. Police used an automated license plate reader from NDI Technologies in June 2021 to link her car to a suspect with a similar name, leading to a brief detention. The city admitted no wrongdoing.

On Dec. 21, 2022, the city of Fayetteville, North Carolina, agreed to pay $60,000 to settle Jacqueline McNeill’s lawsuit alleging civil rights violations by police detectives. McNeill was arrested July 20, 2022, after license plate reader technology misidentified her vehicle as involved in a violent crime. She was held for several hours before detectives realized they had photographed two similar cars and arrested the wrong person. As part of the settlement, the department made no admission of liability, retired Police Chief Gina Hawkins provided a written apology and said the incident would lead to better training.

On November 25, 2022, an officer with the DeKalb County Police Department pulled over Randal Quran Reid and took him into custody based on an arrest warrant from Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. The warrant had been issued on July 18, 2022, after Deputy Andrew Bartholomew used facial recognition technology to incorrectly identify Reid as a theft suspect. Reid was held for six days without bond. The warrant was recalled on November 30, 2022, after officers noticed a mole on Reid’s face that the purse thief did not have.

On this date, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the Detroit Police Department on behalf of Robert Williams, described as the first US person wrongfully arrested based on facial recognition. Williams was arrested in 2019 after a facial recognition system matched a grainy security image to his driver’s license photo. Police showed a photo lineup to a security guard who had not witnessed the shoplifting, and the guard selected Williams. He spent 30 hours in detention. The prosecutor’s office later apologized. The lawsuit alleges police used unreliable facial recognition despite known racial bias. A second man, Michael Oliver, sued last year.

On May 3, 2020, Reno Police Department used DataWorks Plus facial recognition software to match a surveillance photo to an innocent individual, resulting in a wrongful arrest. Officers relied on the algorithmic match without independent corroboration to secure an arrest warrant. Criminal charges were later dropped. The City of Reno settled the resulting civil rights lawsuit for $100,000 and agreed to policy changes requiring independent corroborating evidence before facial recognition matches can be used as probable cause.