Robert Dillon, 52, was arrested at his home in Fort Myers in August 2024 after the Jacksonville Beach Police Department’s AI facial recognition system matched his driver’s license photo to a poor-quality surveillance image of a man who attempted to persuade an unaccompanied girl to leave a McDonald’s restaurant. The algorithm reported a 93% probability of a match, according to the police department.
Dillon told detectives he had never been to Jacksonville Beach, a city more than 300 miles and a five-hour drive from Fort Myers. The charges were dropped last year.
Now Dillon is suing the Jacksonville Beach Police Department, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, and Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri. Gualtieri’s agency maintains and operates the Faces (Face Analysis Comparison and Examination) system, which it leases to other law enforcement agencies.
“The investigation resulted in the wrongful arrest and prosecution of an innocent man,” the ACLU said in the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Fort Myers.
According to the complaint, Jacksonville Beach police lead investigator Scott O’Connell omitted several pieces of readily verifiable exculpatory evidence from the arrest affidavit. License plate readers showed none of Dillon’s vehicles had been near the McDonald’s. O’Connell also failed to disclose to the issuing magistrate that the image run through the facial recognition software was a low-definition screen grab taken from an officer’s cellphone, not a direct digital upload from the security recording.
The lawsuit further alleges that O’Connell did not challenge a McDonald’s employee who picked Dillon from a photo lineup of six similar faces and said the suspect was a “regular customer” at her restaurant who had visited multiple times in recent weeks. O’Connell knew Dillon lived hundreds of miles away, making that claim impossible, the lawsuit states.
“Rather than test the machine’s answer against the evidence that would have cleared him, the officers built a case to confirm it,” Dillon’s lawsuit said.
The ACLU’s Nate Freed Wessler, deputy director of the organization’s speech, privacy, and technology project, said in a statement: “These Florida police departments owe it to Mr. Dillon to make amends and to take serious steps to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else. Police across the country are on notice: Unreliable face recognition technology is hurting people, and we will keep fighting to hold them accountable for these abuses.”
Dillon said he remains traumatized. “Over a year later, I’m still picking up the pieces of my life, all because the police relied on this dangerous technology instead of doing their jobs and actually investigating,” he said. “Florida police must implement safeguards and ensure this never happens to anyone else, because until they do, nobody is safe.”
The lawsuit alleges Dillon’s case is at least the 15th nationwide in which a person was charged or arrested after a false identification by facial recognition technology. A similar case reported earlier this month involved Jalil Richardson of Charlotte, North Carolina. Richardson said he was extradited to Jacksonville and spent nearly three months in jail after facial recognition placed him at the scene of a car theft, even though his timecards showed he was at work 400 miles from the theft site.
The Jacksonville Beach Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.