What started as a routine McDonald’s run in Jacksonville Beach has turned into a test case for police use of facial recognition, after a Fort Myers crabber says an algorithm – and the officers who trusted it – wrecked his life for months.
Robert Dillon, a 52-year-old commercial crabber from Fort Myers, says he was wrongfully arrested after an AI facial-recognition search mistakenly tied him to an alleged child-luring incident at a Jacksonville Beach McDonald’s on November 2, 2023. Dillon and the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit on June 10, 2026, alleging investigators treated a 93 percent similarity score from a statewide database as a near-certain identification. He says he was arrested at his home, held overnight, forced to post bond and prosecuted for months before charges were ultimately dropped.
According to a complaint filed in federal court and posted by CourtListener, investigators ran low-resolution surveillance images through the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office-operated Face Analysis Comparison & Examination System, known as FACES. The system returned a candidate list that included Dillon with a 93 percent similarity score. The filing says officers did not even use a clean video export from McDonald’s, but instead relied on a cellphone picture of a computer monitor playing the security footage, a shortcut Dillon’s lawyers argue made any match inherently shaky…