A Detroit woman is suing the police after she was wrongfully arrested, claiming that faulty facial recognition technology played a role in her being wrongly identified as a suspect. LaDonna Crutchfield, 37, says the police failed to ask basic questions that could have cleared her immediately.
On January 23, 2024, Crutchfield was at home with her kids when officers showed up, handcuffed her, and accused her of attempting murder. According to the lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, Crutchfield was identified as a suspect by an unknown facial recognition database.
Her attorney, Ivan Land, said that police could have easily determined she wasn’t the right person. Crutchfield is 5 inches shorter and several years younger than the actual suspect, yet investigators didn’t check these basic details.
Detroit police acknowledge that Crutchfield wasn’t the right person but insist they never used facial recognition technology in this case. Assistant Chief Charles Fitzgerald said, “Facial recognition was never run. In this case, it was never submitted.”
Instead, the police first linked Crutchfield to the investigation through a partial license plate number from the shooter’s vehicle. The investigation led them to a house on Detroit’s Eastside, where one of Crutchfield’s relatives supposedly once lived, but Crutchfield’s lawyer disputes this claim.
Despite this, there was enough evidence for detectives to believe she was the suspect. Fitzgerald admitted that the police didn’t go far enough with their investigation. He pointed out that the actual suspect was also a woman with a young child, which matched Crutchfield’s situation, but they didn’t dig deeper to consider other possibilities.
After Crutchfield was taken into custody, a detective reportedly showed her pictures of the suspected shooter and said, “You got to admit it looks like you.” Crutchfield, who is Black, fired back, “Why? Because I am fat and Black like her?”
She was only released after agreeing to provide her fingerprints and a DNA sample. Crutchfield feared she would lose at least one of her two jobs, where she worked as an assistant for mentally disabled adults. The next day, she returned to the police station and obtained a letter from a detective certifying she wasn’t involved in the crime.
The lawsuit also highlights previous cases where facial recognition technology led to wrongful arrests, especially of people of color. In 2023, a pregnant woman named Porcha Woodruff was wrongfully arrested in connection to a carjacking, and her attorney was the same as Crutchfield’s.
Crutchfield is not specifying a dollar amount in damages, but she says she’ll never forget the trauma of being handcuffed and marched away in front of her kids and neighbors. Her lawsuit claims that the police “knew or should have known” that their actions would cause her severe emotional distress.
