- A Fort Myers man is suing multiple Florida law enforcement agencies, including the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, after being wrongfully arrested based on a facial recognition system error.
A Fort Myers man who was arrested for a crime he couldn’t have committed is now suing multiple Florida law enforcement agencies, with the ACLU backing the case. The technology at the center of it all is a facial recognition system operated by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. The result is a lawsuit that raises uncomfortable questions about how confidently police departments are leaning on AI tools that, by the evidence’s own admission, got the wrong man.
Robert Dillon, 52, was accused in August 2024 of trying to lure a child at a McDonald’s in Jacksonville Beach. There is just one notable problem with that: Dillon lived more than 300 miles away in Fort Myers and says he had never set foot in Jacksonville Beach. Automatic license plate reader data showed his vehicle had no hits anywhere near that McDonald’s in the relevant timeframe. None of that stopped him from getting arrested.
The chain of events began when a Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office employee fed grainy surveillance footage through an AI-assisted facial recognition program. The system returned Dillon as a possible match. Armed with that hit, investigators then presented a photo lineup to a McDonald’s employee, who identified Dillon’s photo. What police did not disclose to the court when seeking the warrant was that the same McDonald’s employee had described the suspect as a restaurant “regular.” Dillon, again, had allegedly never been there…