Wrongful Arrest Exposes Failures in One of the Oldest Police Face-Recognition Tools in the US

A face-recognition program reported a 93 percent confidence match and sent Robert Dillon, a 52-year-old commercial crabber from Fort Myers, Florida, to jail for an attempted child abduction he had no link to. The ACLU and ACLU of Florida filed a federal lawsuit on June 10, 2026, against three police agencies, arguing officers treated a probabilistic software guess as a near-certain identification while ignoring evidence that cleared him. The case puts a spotlight on one of the oldest police face-recognition tools in the country, operated by the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office.