Pregnant Woman Wrongfully Arrested by Detroit Police Facial Recognition (Porcha Woodruff)
Detroit police arrested Porcha Woodruff — eight months pregnant — based on a faulty facial-recognition match for a carjacking suspect.
In February 2023, Porcha Woodruff, eight months pregnant, was arrested at her Detroit home in front of her children and held for 11 hours on charges of robbery and carjacking — based on a facial-recognition match by Detroit Police to surveillance footage of a different woman. Woodruff was released after providing an alibi, but later suffered contractions and dehydration. She filed federal suit Woodruff v. City of Detroit (E.D. Mich. August 2023) under 42 U.S.C. §1983. She is the sixth publicly-known wrongful arrest victim of Detroit's facial-recognition use, all of them Black. Detroit settled the suit and adopted updated facial-recognition policies as part of the Williams settlement in 2024. The case sharpened calls for federal restrictions on law-enforcement facial recognition.
Systems & Vendors Implicated
Sources
What EvalGuard would have caught
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