That’s Not Me

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0:30Conversations around mental health have evolved a lot over the years, but it can still feel difficult to seek help. BetterHelp's 2026 State of Stigma report surveyed 2 ,000 Americans and revealed that 85 % of Americans believe getting support is wise, yet 74 % say society discourages people from doing so. You don't have to let stigma stand in the way of support. You can start therapy with BetterHelp. You can sign up and get 10 % off at betterhelp.com slash criminal. That's betterhelp.com slash criminal. On the morning of February 16th, 2023, Portia Woodruff was getting her two daughters ready for school.

1:13I was brushing my daughter's hair up, and I heard a loud bang at the door. I was upstairs when I heard it, so I went downstairs. Myself and my youngest daughter went downstairs. And when I went to the door and kind of peeked out, it was the officer standing at the door. A police officer from the Detroit Police Department. She said, are you Portia Woodruff? I said yes. She said, well, I have a warrant for your arrest. And I was like, okay, no, you have to be mistaken. What do you mean you have a warrant for my arrest? She said, no, we have a warrant for your arrest. I would need you to step outside.

1:51You can go with us. And I'm like, whoa, no. What's going on? The officer told Portia that she was being arrested for robbery and carjacking. I'm like, can you tell me when this happened? She's like, oh, well, it happened last year. In addition to the officer at her door, Portia saw that there were five other police officers outside her house, in her driveway, and on the street. Portia told her daughter to go and wake up her fiancé. She also called her mother. I said, Mom, they're here. They say they have a warrant for my arrest. I don't know what's going on. Portia's mother told her she should look at the warrant.

2:31When Portia read it, she noticed that the robbery and carjacking she was being accused of hadn't happened the year before. It had happened just a few weeks earlier, and Portia was about to have a baby. And clearly, you're eight months pregnant. You're visibly pregnant. Yes, yes. we were kind of going back and forth and they weren't listening to me. My mom's like, hey, you might want to look at the paperwork. There's no way. And then once my child's father came down like, hey, what are you guys talking about? What's going on? They were disregarding everything everyone says. So, of course, my children were there.

3:08My youngest started crying. You know, my oldest daughter, she's looking at me, you know, but trying to calm her sister down at the same time. And it's like, okay, what's going on? My mom's pregnant and the police are trying to take her away. I was frightened too, but I'm to the point like, I'm helpless because what can I do? Nothing. I'm saying that it's not, they're not taking it in, basically. Portia agreed to go with the officers. I was handcuffed in front of my children. They walked me off the porch. They handcuffed me in front of, like, in the middle of the street. And then they placed me in the police car.

3:44She was driven to the Detroit Detention Center and put into a holding cell. There are guards speaking to me like, hey, you're pregnant. What are you doing here? I'm like, hey, I don't know. I have no clue. I have no idea. I didn't even speak to a detective until they arrested me at maybe around 7 or 8. I didn't speak to a detective until maybe 12, 1. Police later admitted they knew quickly after Portia's arrival at the police station that she couldn't have been the person they were looking for because of her pregnancy and also because of a large tattoo of a rose on Porsche's arm, which didn't match the suspect's description.

4:25They questioned her anyway. She asked me about a tattoo. She asked me about a location. She asked me about the color of vehicle. She asked me where was I at the day that the incident happened, how many months I was, if I knew a victim and another suspect. if I frequently visit a certain gas station. She asked me a series of questions, and then after, she asked, well, do you have any questions for me? And I'm like, of course, why am I here? And what did she say? Her response was, oh, well, the victim chose a photo of you that was picked up from a video at the gas station. Police had run a picture of a female suspect, taken from a surveillance video through their AI-powered facial recognition system.

5:18She said the database brings up photos and sometimes it'll bring up the wrong photo. And unfortunately, things like this happen. And I'm like, wow, are you serious? I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

5:38A little more than two weeks earlier, on the evening of January 29, 2023, a man named Lawrence Walker called 911. He told the dispatcher that he'd been carjacked at gunpoint. He said two people, a man and a woman, were involved. His phone and his wallet were in his car when it was stolen. Lawrence Walker had spent some time with the woman who was involved in the carjacking, although he didn't know her well. He had picked her up earlier that day and said they had drank together, and he thought she might have drugged him. He described her as a black female with brown and blonde long hair and a slim build.

6:22He said her name was Trinidad. Two days after reporting the carjacking, Lawrence Walker told the police that his cell phone had been dropped off at a gas station. An officer went to the gas station and watched surveillance footage and saw that the woman dropping off the phone matched the description of the woman involved in the carjacking. The police officer took a screenshot of the woman in the gas station's surveillance video. In the image, she's wearing a hat that covers her forehead and eyebrows. They ran this image through their facial recognition system. Doug McMillan is a reporter for The Washington Post.

7:04It's actually a system that's controlled by the state of Michigan, and they send a still image to an examiner in a lab who runs this through an AI-powered software system. the system generally comes back with not one result or not a few results. They generally come back with hundreds of results. And that examiner goes through and selects who they think might be the best match or the best fit for that potential suspect. In this case, the software identified 73 photos in the system as potential matches. An examiner narrowed it down further to just one potential match, Portia Woodruff. That examiner sent that potential match to the Detroit police investigator with the disclaimer, like they always do, that this is just a possible lead and that this is not definitely the suspect, that it's just a potential match and that that police person needs to go and take additional investigative steps to make sure it is the right person before making an arrest.

8:15Police created a photo lineup for Lawrence Walker to look at. It included Porsche's mugshot, which had been taken eight years earlier. When Lawrence Walker saw the photo lineup, he picked out Porsche's picture. The officer conducting the investigation asked him, Are you sure this is the person? Lawrence Walker said yes. But the problem with that is that this facial recognition software is so good at finding somebody who looks like the perpetrator. That's what this machine is built to do. That if it finds somebody who looks like the perpetrator and isn't the perpetrator, that potential suspect is going to fool witnesses.

9:02It's going to fool police investigators, and it could even fool a judge and jury, ultimately, because what they've come back with is a lookalike person and not the real suspect. Portia Woodruff stayed in custody until that evening. She was arraigned and released on a$100 ,000 bond. The police also kept her cell phone. Portia says they told her they wanted to check her phone records to confirm that she wasn't at the crime scene. Portia went straight from the jail to the emergency room. She said she had been having contractions. She got checked out, got IV fluids, and went home in the middle of the night.

9:46When you got home, what's the conversation that you had with your kids like? I talked to them a long while about just me trying to explain to them, Like, you know, not things like this happen. Things like this are not supposed to happen. And still try to have them have some type of trust for, you know, police officers. Because my youngest is like, Mom, they're supposed to help us. You know, we're supposed to call them when we're in trouble or if something bad is happening. You didn't do anything bad. You didn't do anything wrong. Why did they take you? Over the next few weeks, Portia had multiple court hearings before the case was eventually dropped.

10:26Here it is. I'm waiting on the arrival of my son. But the biggest thing that I have going on is trying to see about a case getting dismissed that I have no idea about and shouldn't even be going to court for it to begin with. Portia Woodruff was the first woman in the U.S. known to be wrongfully accused of a crime because of a facial recognition search. The ACLU says more than a dozen people in the U.S. have had this happen to them in recent years. And stories keep surfacing. A Florida man says he was wrongfully arrested after local police used AI facial recognition technology. He spent 17 months in jail for a crime that an artificial intelligence program said he committed.

11:16police in Fargo, North Dakota, used an AI facial recognition hit to tie her to a bank fraud case, despite her saying she'd never been to the state. The very first documented case of this kind of mistaken identity happened in 2020, also in Detroit. A man named Robert Williams was at work at an automotive supply company when he got a call from the Detroit police. They told him to come to the station to turn himself in. He thought it was a joke. When he got home later, a police car pulled into his driveway behind him. He was taken away in handcuffs. Police wouldn't tell him or his family why he was under arrest.

12:03He spent the night in jail. A cellmate told him he had overheard officers saying he was being accused of stealing watches. The next day, detectives showed him a still image showing a man dressed in black, wearing a red hat, standing in front of a watch display. He said, so that's not you? I said, no, that's not me. This is Robert Williams, testifying in front of Congress. He turns over another piece of paper. He says, so I guess that's not you either. I held that piece of paper up to my face and said, I hope you don't think all black people look alike. he turned over another paper and said, so I guess the computer got it wrong.

12:43Robert Williams was eventually released, and the case against him was dropped. He later wrote about his arrest, I felt like I was in a bad movie. I couldn't leave.

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15:25In the 1960s, a computer scientist named Woody Bledsoe started working on a system of measurements that could help computers recognize faces in photos. According to a profile in Wired magazine, Woody Bledsoe had his teenage son and a friend go through photos of about 50 people, measuring how long their ears were or the width of their mouth. That data was then entered into a computer to see if the computer could match the information to a face in a set of photographs. Their initial goal was to teach a computer to recognize 10 faces. It was rumored that Woody Bledsoe's research was funded by the CIA.

16:12He eventually taught a computer to successfully recognize hundreds of white male faces. And in the 1980s, he used his research when he was hired as an expert witness in a criminal trial. His testimony, which showed that an image taken from a surveillance video did not match the defendant on trial because their noses were different sizes, led to the defendant being acquitted of several crimes. Today, Woody Bledsoe is considered one of the founders of artificial intelligence. When did police start to use this technology? It's not completely new. This has been used in some form by some police for more than two decades.

16:58In Florida, there's a sheriff called the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office that has been using facial recognition in some form for more than two decades. But the technology was pretty bad, and it was very kind of unreliable. In 2018, the ACLU ran a test using a facial recognition software made by Amazon called Recognition. They uploaded a photo of every member of the U.S. House and Senate and compared them with 25 ,000 publicly available arrest photos. The software incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress with arrest photos. Almost 40 % of those incorrect matches were people of color. A year later, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, looked at a number of different facial recognition programs and found higher rates of false identifications for Asian, African American, and Native American people versus white people.

18:07It also had a harder time correctly identifying women than men. But a 2025 study by NIST found that the error rate has fallen dramatically in recent years. You really started to kind of get these magical moments where you can really see demos of this technology working incredibly well. And all you need to do is put in a picture. You can even test on yourself. You can put in a picture of yourself and it'll magically grab images from all over the Internet that maybe you don't even know existed. OK, I'm recording. All right. So, okay, I'm uploading a picture of me. It's a straight-on headshot. I am wearing makeup.

18:57I'm going to accept that I'm over 18. And I'm going to start searching. It's saying it's searching for... Okay, so what has come up here is a lot of pictures of me. um these are pictures a lot of I've never seen some of these pictures before so I'm seeing here probably 50 pictures of me from all different types of photo shoots pictures that people have taken of me in a professional setting headshots but then also pictures that I don't know where of me on stage. I'd say there's probably 50 pictures of me up here. It does have this very incredible, almost uncanny ability to scour the internet or scour a database of images to find somebody who looks like you or somebody who is you.

20:03And I think police, in a time when they're very strapped for resources, This is a very promising and alluring tool for helping them solve some of the most difficult crimes. Some of the most difficult crimes you could think of are ones where the only witness was a video camera. The problem is, you know, we don't actually know how effective it is. When the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, tests facial recognition programs, it uses too high-quality images of front-facing people. The Federation of American Scientists says these are, quote, relatively ideal conditions, and that in the real world, error rates might be much higher.

20:49In very perfect conditions, when you essentially have a yearbook photo of somebody with perfect lighting, who is perfectly framed with their face facing forward, facial recognition is very good at identifying the right person in that setting. But that's not how police are using these tools. In the wild, the photos that are often getting used in a law enforcement context are really low quality. Caitlin Roll works as a public defender. The software can get better and better and better. It could get exponentially better. But if what you're putting in is a grainy black and white surveillance photo taken from overhead where someone's looking to the side and wearing a beanie, it doesn't matter how good the technology is because the software just can't do a good job comparing it.

21:37Eight years ago, Caitlin was working in the Bronx and was assigned a client who had been charged with robbery in the first degree. The robbery had happened at a TJ Maxx. Caitlin says surveillance video showed someone stealing some socks. And then, when a security guard approached them, the person waved a box cutter at them and left. A few months later, Caitlin's client was picked up by the police. I just couldn't figure out why they connected him to this robbery. He didn't make any statement saying he had done this. There was nobody found the socks. He didn't leave something that belonged to him.

22:21It was just an arrest months later. So I called the prosecutor and said, why do you think my guy did this? And he said, you're never going to believe this, Caitlin. They used facial recognition. It was the first time that Caitlin had heard about someone being identified this way. She started digging into the case to figure out what had happened. So the police went to that TJ Maxx and they pulled surveillance video. And when they pulled surveillance video, they talked to the loss prevention officer. And what they told him was, we have this fancy new facial recognition software we're going to run this surveillance through.

22:59The NYPD then ran a still image from the video through the software. Caitlin says it was a black and white image taken from above. The person was wearing a hat. Caitlin's client came up as one of the possible matches. The police took a screen grab of just my client's mugshot and they text messaged it to the loss prevention officer. And what they said was, is this the person who robbed you? The security guard texted back, yes, this was the person who robbed the store. What was particularly concerning and interesting in this case is that we had a very good but not perfect alibi for where he was that day.

23:46What was it? So his baby boy was born that day. We had photos of him in the hospital. We had the birth certificate that he was on. We showed all of that to the prosecution. The problem is that the birth time was a couple hours different than the time that the socks were stolen. So is it theoretically possible he was sitting there through the birth of his child and thought, you know what, I'm going to run to TJ Maxx and steal some white socks? It's possible, but it's deeply, deeply unlikely. And we were in this tricky spot where both the police and the prosecution who do not understand this technology were sort of saying, well, yeah, sure, you've got that.

24:34But, you know, in their minds, like facial recognition couldn't have got it wrong. There's a phenomenon that researchers talk about that's called algorithmic bias, that when you have a very fancy, expensive machine and you put it in front of these police officers and it gives them a result, they are likely to believe that that is the right person. that the computer must be telling me the right person because, you know, it's a very fancy machine and it's a very expensive machine. And that is going to be probably be the suspect that we're looking for. And so when police get that result, they do seem to go out of their way to try to find that person guilty.

25:17And they do tend sometimes forget to take other investigative steps that you normally would, like interviewing witnesses, going to check financial records in bank accounts, going to do basic police work that all police have been trained to do, once they get this AI result, some of this seems to go out the door and they sometimes get blinders on where they're just kind of focusing on how do we get this person in custody, how do we get this person prosecuted. Caitlin says she thinks her client would have had a strong case at trial. But he had a new baby and he could have sat in jail for a very long time waiting for that trial.

26:01So ultimately he took the plea. How long was he in jail for? About six months. Caitlin Rule says since this case, she's worked on other cases where facial recognition technology has been used by police. typically using surveillance photos. But she suspects it's being used more often than she and other defense attorneys know about. Police generally do not disclose when they're using this technology. In most places in the country, police are not required to say that they've used facial recognition in this way to identify a suspect. I went through hundreds of police reports from departments all over the country where they're using these tools.

26:46We knew from internal logs that they were using this technology. But when we read the police reports, nine times out of ten, they were not anywhere explicitly saying facial recognition technology. At most, they were usually saying, we used investigative techniques to identify this person. So therefore, most of the time, the defendants have no idea if they were identified using this machine. So ultimately, you know, there could be people who were taken to trial. There could be people who were convicted. There could be even people who accepted plea deals, people who are behind bars right now who are misidentified by facial recognition.

27:24And we don't even know about it. So maybe there are dozens or maybe there are even hundreds more of people who are wrongly identified this way.