Florida man sues police over facial recognition arrest
Robert Dillon alleges officers used a 93% facial recognition score to arrest him while ignoring records that could have cleared him.
By James Whitfield · Staff Writer
4 min read
A Florida man has sued police and sheriff’s officials, alleging he was wrongly arrested after facial recognition software linked him to a child-luring investigation in Jacksonville Beach. The case challenges how officers used an algorithmic match while, according to the complaint, leaving out evidence that pointed away from him.
Robert Dillon, a 52-year-old Fort Myers resident, filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. The defendants include the City of Jacksonville Beach, Jacksonville Beach Police Corporal Scott O’Connell, Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri and Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office Sergeant James Walters.
The lawsuit says Dillon was arrested in August 2024 after the Face Analysis Comparison and Examination System, known as FACES, returned a 93 percent match between Dillon and a man seen in McDonald’s surveillance footage. Prosecutors dropped the case more than two months later, according to the complaint.
Complaint says officers relied on a weak image
The investigation began after police responded shortly before midnight on Nov. 2, 2023, to a report that a man inside a Jacksonville Beach McDonald’s had asked a girl under 12 whether she wanted to leave with him, the lawsuit says. The girl declined, called her mother and the man left, according to the complaint.
Dillon says he had not been to Jacksonville Beach, which is more than 300 miles from Fort Myers. The lawsuit says a license plate reader search found neither of Dillon’s vehicles in Duval County from Nov. 1 through Nov. 3, 2023, but that information was not included in the warrant affidavit.
The complaint says the facial recognition search used a poor-quality image: a photograph of a McDonald’s computer screen showing surveillance video, rather than an exported frame from the original video. The lawsuit says that added glare, lower resolution and color distortion to footage that was already limited.
FACES is maintained by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office and includes more than 38.5 million images, including mugshots and driver’s license photos, according to the complaint. The lawsuit says at least 196 law enforcement agencies had access to the system as of 2022.
The complaint says the 93 percent figure was a confidence score measuring similarity between digital templates, not a probability that the two images showed the same person. It also says Jacksonville Beach Police policy does not treat facial recognition output as a positive identification or probable cause by itself.
ACLU says exculpatory evidence was withheld
Dillon is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the law firm Hoguet Newman Regal & Kenney. The ACLU said police used an incorrect facial recognition result to seek an arrest warrant while withholding evidence that would have shown Dillon could not have committed the offense.
The lawsuit says O’Connell spoke with Dillon before seeking the warrant and that Dillon denied involvement, said he had never been to Jacksonville Beach and described a scar running from his hairline to his nose. The complaint says those statements and the scar were not disclosed to the magistrate.
The lawsuit also faults police for not seeking McDonald’s mobile ordering records, payment data, app account records, older surveillance showing visits by a “regular customer,” cell phone location records, travel records or financial records. According to the complaint, the man in the footage appeared to have placed an order in advance.
After the FACES search, the lawsuit says, O’Connell used a photo array that included Dillon and showed it to a McDonald’s manager, who identified Dillon as the man in a black trench coat. The complaint says the array’s other photos were selected to resemble Dillon rather than the suspect, and that the victim was not shown the array.
Dillon was arrested at home in front of his wife and spent a night in jail, according to the lawsuit. The complaint says he borrowed money and pledged his truck title to post bond, lost work as a self-employed commercial crabber and continues to deal with public fallout from the case.
The ACLU said Dillon is one of 15 known people in the United States wrongly arrested after facial recognition matches. The lawsuit seeks damages and changes to how the police and sheriff’s offices use the technology.
This story draws on original reporting from Ars Technica.