‘Why? Because I Am Fat and Black Like Her?’: Detroit Woman Falsely Accused of Attempted Murder Through Facial Recognition Software Files Lawsuit Against Police
LaDonna Crutchfield, a 37-year-old Black woman, was lying on her bed, reading to her 5-year-old daughter, when police began pounding on her door.
Crutchfield’s niece opened the door and encountered six Detroit police officers who demanded to speak to her aunt.
When Crutchfield walked to the door to see what they wanted, they ordered her to step outside and arrested her, claiming they had a warrant over a missed court date.
It was only after she was sitting in the back of a patrol car with her hands cuffed behind her back that she realized she was being arrested on a charge of assault to commit murder after police confused her for another Black woman. She ended up spending eight hours in jail before she was released.
Turns out, police used a facial recognition database which is part of their Green Light Project which matched Crutchfield’s face to the face of another Black woman who was the real suspect in the alleged crime, according to a federal lawsuit filed Friday against the Detroit Police Department. The complaint accuses police of several violations, including false arrest and assault and battery.
However, Detroit police claim her false arrest was not a result of facial recognition software but their own incompetence.
“This case has nothing to do with facial (recognition),” Assistant Detroit Police Chief Charles Fitzgerald told Fox 2.
“There was an investigation done,” Fitzgerald continued. “The investigation led back to a partial plate. It was a house on the east side. That east side home let us back to our plaintiff. When they compare the image they got from a video just an image. They didn’t do any facial rec. It led us to this individual.”
However, the police reports included as exhibits in the lawsuit indicate otherwise.
“On December 29, 2023, 4:00 p.m., I conducted a database search,” reads a report written by one of the officers who arrested her.
Police redacted the sentences following that statement, but the final sentence in the paragraph is not redacted and states the following:
“Ms. Crutchfield matched the suspected I observed through green light with the shooting weapon. I then turned over my findings to Detective Thompson.”
And Detroit police have a history of wrongly arresting Black citizens based on faulty facial recognition matches, including in 2023 when they arrested Porcha Woodruff, a 32-year-old Black woman who was arrested on a warrant for robbery and carjacking while getting her kids ready for school.
Woodruff, who was pregnant, ended up spending hours in jail before she was released.
In 2019, civilian Detroit Police Commission member Willie Burton referred to facial recognition technology as “techno-racism.”
“Every black man with a beard looks alike to it. Every black man with a hoodie looks alike. This is techno-racism,” Burton said in a news interview at the time.
In 2021, a 14-year-old Black girl was barred from a Detroit-area skating rink after the business used facial recognition software to ban her from the rink after confusing her with another Black girl involved in a brawl.
The Arrest
It was just after 2 p.m. on Jan. 23, 2024, when Detroit police knocked on her door to arrest her.
Crutchfield, who works 14 hours a day at two jobs to support her three children and her niece, whom she is supporting after the girl’s mother died of COVID-19, had just gotten home from one of her jobs and was relaxing with her daughter.
But only minutes later, she was being transported to the police station on false accusations that she tried to kill another person.
At the police station, detectives began interrogating her, showing her a collection of photos of heavyset Black women, according to the claim.
Detroit Police Detective Marc Thompson pointed to a photo of a Black woman wearing a bonnet and asked Crutchfield if she was the woman in the photo, which she denied.
“You got to admit it — that looks like you,” Thompson said, according to the claim.
“Why? Because I am fat and Black like her?” she responded.
But Thompson did not believe her, telling her he believed she was involved in a shooting that he had been investigating, telling her the time, date and location of the shooting.
However, Crutchfield told the detective she had been working at the time of the shooting and had alibis to prove it, which apparently was enough to convince the detective.
“I don’t believe Ms. Crutchfield did the shooting,” Thompson told his partner, Careema Yopp, and his partner agreed with his assessment, according to the claim.
The detectives told her she would be released immediately, but she was released eight hours later after she was forced to provide police with her fingerprints and a DNA sample through a swab.
After she was released, her mother drove her home, where she explained to the children what had taken place before she left to work her second job, crying as she was driving because the cops told her she could be arrested again for the same crime.
The following day she drove back to the police station and demanded documentation that she was clear of being a suspect in the alleged crime.
Detective Thompson apologized for the mistake and gave her a letter stating, “I am now able to declare Ms. Crutchfield is not the subject involved in this criminal investigation.”
Crutchfield’s arrest is only one of many arrests of innocent Black citizens over the years who police believed “matched the description” of another Black person who had committed a crime – simply because they shared the same skin tone.
And technology has not improved things because Crutchfield is one of several innocent Black citizens arrested over the years after facial recognition software wrongly matched them to other Black people suspected of committing crimes, including a New Jersey man who spent eight days in jail on false charges in 2021.
In fact, a 2018 study cited by the ACLU determined that facial recognition technology misidentified Black women 35 percent of the time while hardly ever getting it wrong for white men.
“If government agencies like police departments and the FBI are authorized to deploy invasive face surveillance technologies against our communities, these technologies will unquestionably be used to target Black and Brown people merely for existing,” the ACLU states.