Robert Dillon lives in Fort Myers. The Jacksonville Beach police had a screen grab from a cellphone, taken off a security monitor, so low-resolution it would embarrass a flip phone. They fed it to a computer called Faces — the Face Analysis Comparison and Examination system, operated by the Pinellas County sheriff and leased to other departments. The machine said it was 93 percent sure the man on the screen was Dillon. The cops liked that number. They arrested him at home, in front of his wife, on charges of trying to lure a girl younger than twelve.
He had never been to Jacksonville Beach. He lives 300 miles away. License-plate readers showed none of his vehicles anywhere near that McDonald’s. The employee who picked his face from a photo lineup called the suspect a “regular customer” who had visited many times — a detail that, taken seriously, meant the man on the tape was there, and Dillon was not. The lead investigator, Scott O’Connell, knew all of this. He left it out of the arrest affidavit anyway.
The lawsuit the ACLU filed on Dillon’s behalf this week calls what O’Connell did a deliberate omission of “multiple categories of readily verifiable exculpatory evidence.” Translation: the detective had facts that cleared the man, and he hid them from the judge. Not because they were complicated. Because they contradicted the computer. The Faces system had spoken; O’Connell’s job was to build a case to confirm it, not to find out what actually happened.
He arrested him anyway.
This is not a technology failure. It is a policing failure dressed as a technology failure, which is worse. The machines are unreliable — this we know; a Guardian investigation last month found oversight so “woefully inadequate” that, the paper reported, advances in the technology were far outpacing authorities’ ability to regulate it. Dillon’s is at least the fifteenth such arrest or charge nationally. In Detroit in 2020, Robert Williams was held thirty hours on a shoplifting charge after a blurry still was run through an algorithm. Nijeer Parks sat in a New Jersey jail. Porcha Woodruff, eight months pregnant, was handcuffed outside her home and accused of a carjacking. Randal Reid, a Georgia man, was jailed on a Louisiana warrant for a state he had never set foot in. This month, Jalil Richardson, of Charlotte, spent nearly three months in a Jacksonville jail after the system placed him at a car theft — while his timecards showed him at work 400 miles away. Extradition is an expensive, deliberate act; the machine output was treated as enough to override an alibi that was sitting in plain sight. The computer spoke; the cops stopped investigating.
Each time, a human officer chose not to verify. Each time, the institution treated the algorithm’s output as a conclusion rather than a question. Each time, the person arrested bore the cost — the cell, the mugshot, the accusation — and the agency that made the error bore none that changed the practice.
I have watched this movie for sixty years. The tool changes. The structure does not. A 93 percent probability is a lead. A lead is where an investigation begins, not where it ends. What O’Connell is accused of is not investigation — it is confirmation built backward from the machine’s output. And the distinction is the difference between policing and what happened to Robert Dillon.
What makes it contemptible, not merely incompetent, is the cover-up. The officer who files an affidavit that omits facts he knows, facts that would have freed the man, is not making an honest mistake. He is committing a lie-under-oath-adjacent act to protect a conviction he already decided was right, because a screen told him so. The machine gave him permission to stop being a detective. He took it.
There is a word for pretending that a dubious computer output is the same as evidence: superstition. The Jacksonville Beach police department has a talisman now. They call it Faces. It lets them charge a man with a life-wrecking crime without doing the work a competent investigation requires — checking a license plate, noticing a five-hour drive, testing an eyewitness claim. And when the talisman pointed at the wrong man, the officers did not question it. They protected it. They hid the exculpatory evidence, just as a faith healer hides the earpiece.
The cost falls on people like Dillon, whose mugshot is still online, who no longer feels safe being friendly to children, who is still picking up the pieces. The Jacksonville Beach police get to issue no apology, admit no error, face no discipline. Florida has been busy lately suing OpenAI over the alleged harms of artificial intelligence, but its own agencies are using AI to arrest the wrong people and covering their tracks. The same state that wants to hold a company liable for what a computer said is itself asking judges to accept what a computer said without checking the facts that would correct it. The state demands accountability from a corporation while it grants its own officers the unchecked discretion to bury exculpatory evidence behind a software printout. The hypocrisy is not a footnote; it is the structural condition of a system that treats machine output as conclusive when a private company produces it, and as sacrosanct when a uniformed officer swears to it.
If that strikes you as a two-tier justice system, you are paying attention. A man is jailed because a machine said so and the police refused to test the answer. The machine cannot be cross-examined, but the officers who fed it the photo can be. They are being sued now, and they owe Dillon more than money. They owe him the admission that they knew, and they did it anyway.
The pixel prophets of Jacksonville Beach trusted a computer over the evidence. They will do it again — until a courtroom makes it expensive. The machine said 93 percent. The truth said zero. The cops went with the machine.