A North Carolina man has been freed after months in jail after authorities determined he did not commit the crime for which he was accused. Now, the exonerated man is blaming a false AI identification, shoddy police work and racial profiling for his arrest and detention.
AI wrongly identified a North Carolina man for car theft crimes in Florida
Action News Jax reported that Jalil Richardson of Charlotte, North Carolina, was arrested and jailed for nearly three months, falsely accused of selling a stolen car to a man in Jacksonville, Florida. Richardson’s arrest came in part because Jacksonville police used Automated Facial Recognition, an artificial intelligence-driven software program, to identify Richardson as the suspect seen in surveillance footage of the car sale.
Richardson’s wife, Jasmine Jackson, said officers told the couple that Richardson had been identified as an “85% match” by the software. Based on the positive AI identification of Richardson’s photo as matching the suspect, as well as an identification from the man who reported the car fraud, Richardson was jailed on a litany of charges, including grand theft, dealing in stolen property and possession of a fraudulent title, among others.
Richardson, meanwhile, maintained that he was at work hundreds of miles away in North Carolina when the crimes occurred in Florida, and timecards from the job he had at the time verify this. Now, authorities have released Richardson and dropped all charges…