Fort Myers man falsely arrested; lawsuit says AI program is to blame

FORT MYERS, Fla. (WINK)—A Fort Myers man was arrested after facial recognition technology gave police a 93% match between him and a man caught on surveillance video trying to lure a young girl to come home with him.

" It used to be you were innocent until proven guilty," said Robert Dillon. "Nowadays it seems like you're guilty until proven innocent."

Dillon spent thousands of dollars to prove his innocence in an investigation happening hundreds of miles from his home in Fort Myers.

" I'm not driving six and a half hours to McDonald's in Jacksonville Beach to get a cheeseburger," said Dillon. "You know?"

In November of 2023, a young girl reported a man in a McDonald's asked if she wanted to go home with him. She said no and he asked a second time.

The girl's family reported the incident to the Jacksonville Beach Police Department (JBPD), who began to investigate.

The incident report says the Jacksonville County Sheriff's Office (JCSO) used pictures from surveillance video at a Jacksonville Beach McDonald's to put through a facial recognition program. Robert Dillon came back as a 93% match.

The incident report says a witness described the man who tried to lure the young girl was "a regular customer". Using the photo from the facial recognition program, JBPD asked the witness to pick the man from a line up of 6.

She picked the photo of Dillon.

"You would have to see the actual perpetrator and me, and in five seconds you're like that's not, it's not even close," Dillon said.

Dillon filed a lawsuit on Wednesday with the support of the ACLU, a civil rights group.

" You had police run a face recognition search, take the result, put the result into a photo lineup they showed to a witness. But because the algorithm got it wrong, but got it wrong by flagging a face that looks somewhat similar, it totally misleads the witness," said Nate Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology project. "They misidentify an innocent person, and then that's what police rely on."

Freed Wessler has been concerned about police misuse of facial recognition technology for years. He said there are 15 publicly known cases of wrongful arrests across the country, just like Dillon's.

"This whole thing has completely destroyed me inside," Dillon said.

Dillon is a father, his child was only a few years older than the girl that was lured in the Jacksonville Beach McDonald's in 2023.

"My biggest hope is that no one, even my worst enemy, doesn't have to go through it," Dillon said, heartbroken he was accused of hurting a child. "It has been mental torture for someone that loves kids the way I do to be accused of something like that."

Dillon, who had never been in the Jacksonville Beach area, spent two nights in jail and thousands of dollars in legal fees. He said he didn't tell his daughter why he was arrested for months because he didn't want her to try to figure out in her mind whether he was right or wrong.

"I couldn't face my child to tell her that I was being accused of trying to allure a child that was only a year or two older than her," Dillon said.

Dillon spent months proving his innocence. He fell into a place of depression, not leaving his home and ending his decades-long career as a crabber.

WINK News reached out to the law enforcement agencies named in the lawsuit to see whether they have created any policy related to their facial recognition software to prevent this from happening in the future. The Jacksonville Beach Police Department and Jacksonville Sheriff's Office said they could not comment on the lawsuit.