Trevis Williams, a Black father from Brooklyn said he was wrongfully arrested after facial recognition technology used by the New York City Police Department misidentified him.
An attorney for Williams, 36, says back in April, the NYPD used facial recognition technology that misidentified him as a man who exposed himself to a woman in Manhattan earlier in the year.
He was subsequently jailed for two days and was charged with an indecent exposure crime.
According to the New York Times, the 911 call was made in February by a woman who told the police that a deliveryman had exposed himself to her in a Manhattan building. She reportedly described the man as being 5 feet 6 inches. Williams was arrested two months after the incident was reported.
Williams, who is 6’2″ and weighs 230 pounds, told ABC that the actual criminal the NYPD was after looked nothing like him, outside of the fact that they are both Black men with similar hair.
“I was so angry … I was stressed out,” Williams recalled. “The man they were looking for — he was eight inches shorter than me and 70 pounds lighter.”
The victim identified Williams in a photo lineup despite location data showing he was 12 miles away in Connecticut at the time of the incident.
“That’s not me, man,” Williams told police during interrogation. “I swear to God, that’s not me.”
“Of course you’re going to say that wasn’t you,” a detective replied.
He then asked what would happen if he pulled Mr. Williams’s employment records.
“Pull it,” Mr. Williams replied. “Please look it up.”
The police charged him the following day, according to NewsOne.
“The victim positively identified Mr. Williams,” said Brad Weekes, a spokesman for the Police Department. Mr. Weekes said the victim had told detectives she was “confident that was the same person, and only then was probable cause established to make an arrest.”
Charges against Williams were dismissed in July.
“I was in the process of becoming a correctional officer at Rikers Island,” Williams said. “They kind of froze the hiring process.”