It’s been nearly a year since Robert Dillon was wrongfully arrested .
Last August, he was handcuffed outside his San Carlos Park home, accused of trying to lure a child at a restaurant more than 300 miles away in Jacksonville Beach.
Investigators there submitted surveillance photos of the suspect to a facial recognition program – artificial intelligence – which identified Dillon as a 93% match, according to the police report.
But beyond that – and a witness who picked Dillon’s photo out of a lineup 2 months after the crime – there was no evidence tying him to it.
And Dillon said he’s never been to Jacksonville Beach.
“They wrongly arrested me. They wrongfully accused me. Everything they did was wrong,” Dillon said.
Eventually, the state attorney there dropped the case. But the impact it has had on Dillon hasn’t gone away.
“When we're wrong, we're held accountable for our actions. They want to put us in a jail cell,” he said. “But when they wrong the citizens of Florida, it's just no big deal. Gets brushed under the carpet."
Little did Dillon know, this wasn't the first time police used AI to identify him as a suspect.
In April 2023, a Lee County deputy was called to a bar after a man was punched in the face.
The deputy submitted a still photo from bar video to their intelligence center for facial recognition, which identified Dillon as a possible suspect.
The man who was punched identified him, too.
In this case, when deputies showed up at his door, Dillon admitted to the crime, saying the man was being rude and causing problems.
“I am the type of person — I do the crime, I do the time. I don't have a problem with that,” Dillon said.
"Lee County did it properly. Or it was successful. Jacksonville obviously was not. There you go, 50/50,” he said of the facial recognition technology.
While FGCU legal expert Pamella Seay believes AI has shown promise, she worries about an overreliance on the emerging technology.
“What we need to do is use artificial intelligence properly. And make sure we are not going beyond its capacity,” she said.
Gulf Coast News found out which police agencies in Lee County use facial recognition.
A spokesperson for Cape Coral police said they are not currently using the technology.
The Lee County Sheriff’s Office, as mentioned in Dillon's case, does use it – multiple programs – but said in a statement to Gulf Coast News they are “only used to provide investigative leads, not used for independent verification or positive ID.”
“No arrests are made solely on any possible facial match,” a spokesperson for the agency wrote in an email. “They require other independent investigative work.”
Fort Myers police Lt. Daniel Morency said their department is also using the technology. They use a program managed by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office.
Morency said the community can be confident in how the department uses the technology, saying that a facial recognition match is only considered one piece of evidence – and a small piece, at that.
“The probable cause is not strictly coming from this one lead,” he said. “You’re not building your case around that. You’re building your case around the facts of the crime.”
At last check, the state attorney’s office in Jacksonville was submitting paperwork to the FDLE to have the case stricken from Robert Dillon’s record.
But he’s still out of the money he spent to get out of jail and to hire an attorney.
He’s called other attorneys in hopes of filing a lawsuit, but said it hasn’t worked out yet.
“The first question they ask me. Do you have a criminal record?" he said. “Because somebody had a scrape with the law in the past, shouldn't mean that they can't get justice."
That remains Dillon’s hope: that he still can get justice in all this.
“If I do somebody wrong, I do the crime. I do the time,” Dillon said. “If they do somebody wrong, there's no consequences. And that really pisses me off."
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