This Week in Tech, Race, and Gender - DINT 139
Christopher Gatlin didn't even take the train, he was still arrested for an assault on a train station security guard. You won't believe what happened next.
Heads up! The Washington Post published a roundup of the handful of cases of false arrests due to AI recently.
Out of the eight people who were arrested on faulty evidence, seven of them are Black. The technology wasn’t the only part of the legal process that let these innocent citizens down.
Overzealous policing, lazy policing, and a binary justice system in a digital age
In some of the false arrest cases, the falsely accused or their family members had to intervene to get justice. For instance,
Alonzo Sawyer’s wife traveled 90 miles to confront the probation officer who was pressured by police into identifying the suspect they believed committed a crime (based on AI/facial recognition data). The officer recanted his testimony, paving the way to freeing Sawyer from his false arrest.
There appears to be no self-correct process for use of facial recognition. The Post also published the 15 police departments that used AI as the only basis for arresting an individual. Six of the 15 are in Florida. Texas holds eight of those jurisdictions.
Desperate officer turns to AI for leads on a heinous assault
The Post’s coverage revealed another person wrongly accused of a crime due to uncorroborated tech evidence. His name is Christopher Gatlin and he was arrested on suspicion of participating in an assault on a security guard on a train platform in Pagedale, Missouri in January 2021. The assault left the security guard with brain trauma, greatly affecting his memory of the incident.
Eight months later, the police were coming up empty in the investigation. The detective assigned to the case decided to try one last thing: facial recognition software.
Detective Matthew Shute uploaded a grainy image of video from the assault of a man leaving the scene. His chin down is covered by a surgical mask. The results produced a handful of suspects of which Gatlin was one. Shute chose him and began to build a case that Gatlin was involved in the assault.
False arrest leads to 16 months in jail for innocent man
Gatlin ended up spending 16 months in jail because he couldn’t meet the $750,000 bond.
Officer Shute, during testimony in a hearing held in February 2024 admitted:
He did place the grainy surveillance image into a facial recognition scan
He did participate in an improper photo lineup pressuring a mentally impaired witness into identifying Christopher Gatlin as one of his attackers
His investigation was not a “reliable way to get a legitimate identification of a suspect.”
Case against Gatlin dismissed but the legal battle isn’t over
The judge presiding over Gatlin’s case, St. Louis Circuit Court Judge Brian May, did the following:
Immediately dismissed the identification made by the victim who had suffered brain damage during the attack, which impaired his memory of the incident.
Stated that Officer Shute was “over zealous” in trying to solve the case.
The next month (March 2024), prosecutors dropped all charges. This month, Gatlin sued Officer Shute, Officer Matthew Welle, and other agencies and individuals involved in his false arrest.
We will add Mr. Gatlin’s name to our list of court cases to watch. We’ve already covered two other facial recognition cases which settled out of court late last year.
Related Coverage
Is $300k Justice for a 10-Day Wrongful Detainment Involving AI?
Few images of detective, prosecutor, and public defender involved in Gatlin’s case, why?
Also of note, coverage of Gatlin’s case by media outlets missed a critical element: images of the officers, public defenders, prosecutors, and the judge involved in the case. There are plenty of images of Gatlin, though.
A search for images of Officer Shute, the primary law enforcement officer in Gatlin’s case, we came up with only this image from the St. Louis County Police Central County Precinct’s Facebook page.
The image above image is from an October 20, 2022 Facebook post which lauded Officer Shute and another law enforcement officer for saving a woman from her submerged car during a flash flood.
The Facebook post doesn’t identify which officer is Shute. We did find a video of Shute being interviewed about the rescue. Based on that and the picture above, it looks like Officer Shute is the person in the middle, holding a plaque.
[Video] Driver thanks officers who rescued her during historic July floods
It’s interesting that images around the case center on those who were wronged, and not those involved in the legal system and law enforcement. Why is that?
[Update] We did find an image of the judge who dismissed Gatlin’s case, St. Louis Circuit Court Judge Brian May:
But there are no images of his public defender or the prosecutors involved.
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