- A Florida man was arrested on a child‑abduction charge after officers relied on a facial‑recognition match that the ACLU says was unreliable.
The ACLU has filed a lawsuit (docket No. 5:2026‑FL‑01234) against the Fort Myers Police Department and the Lee County Sheriff's Office. The complaint says the agencies used the state‑run FDLE facial‑recognition system, which flagged the suspect with a 72 % confidence score. Officers presented the match to detectives as “near‑certain,” then moved forward without requiring a second biometric check or a human reviewer to verify the result.
If the court finds the agencies ignored standard verification steps, the case could force police to adopt stricter checks for all legacy face‑matching tools. That matters because the FDLE system, first deployed in the early 2000s, has a documented false‑positive rate of roughly 1 in 1,000 when used on a wide‑scale watchlist.
The incident adds to a growing list of wrongful arrests tied to aging facial‑recognition tech, reminding jurisdictions that confidence scores are not guarantees of identity.