AI incident ·
Florida Police Reportedly Wrongfully Arrested Commercial Crabber Robert Dillon After Allegedly False Facial Recognition Match
In brief
An AI system built by Pinellas County Sheriff's Office and Facial recognition system developers and deployed by Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, Law enforcement agencies and 3 others allegedly harmed Wrongfully arrested individuals, Robert Dillon and 3 others.
- Risk domain
- Not classified
- Occurred
- Coverage
- 2 reports
What happened
Florida police reportedly arrested commercial crabber Robert Dillon in August 2024 after the statewide FACES facial recognition system purportedly identified him as a possible match to a suspect shown in grainy surveillance images from Jacksonville Beach. Dillon reportedly lived more than 300 miles away and said he had never visited the city. He reportedly spent a night in jail and posted bond using his truck title.
Editor's notes
Timeline notes: The date of 08/26/2024 for this incident ID is taken from the date of arrest; the ACLU filed its lawsuit on 06/10/2026. The incident ID was created 06/18/2026.
Laws that address this harm
No recorded instrument yet addresses this use case where it happened. See the open queue.
Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).
News reports (2)
Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- Pinellas County Sheriff's Office Law enforcement agencies Jacksonville Sheriff's Office Jacksonville Beach Police Department Facial recognition system deployers
- Alleged developer
- Pinellas County Sheriff's Office Facial recognition system developers
- Alleged harmed party
- Wrongfully arrested individuals Robert Dillon Privacy People misidentified by facial recognition systems Biometric data subjects
AI systems implicated
Law enforcement facial recognition systemsFacial recognition systemsFace Analysis Comparison and Examination System Next (FACESNXT)AI-enabled decision support systems
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
- —
- Risk subdomain
- —
- Causal entity
- —
- Intent
- —
- Timing
- —
- Harm level
- —
- Sectors
- —
- Countries
- —
Related incidents
Linked by editors or by text similarity in the source dataset.
Source record: incident #1545 on the AI Incident Database · all 2 reports