A Detroit woman is suing the city and a police detective after she says facial recognition technology wrongfully pegged her as a robbery and carjacking suspect while she was eight months pregnant, leading to her arrest.
Porcha Woodruff, 32, in a lawsuit filed Thursday said she was left scared, humiliated and her pregnancy jeopardized after being arrested at her home back in February by six police officers as she readied her two young children, ages 6 and 12, for school.
“Are you kidding, carjacking? Do you see that I am eight months pregnant?” she said she told one of the arresting officers, according to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.
Woodruff, while dealing with gestational diabetes from her pregnancy, said she was taken to a detention center and held for 11 hours after being implicated as a suspect in an armed robbery that took place several weeks earlier.
The case against her was later dropped. Woodruff’s suit claims that this was due to a lack of evidence. The Wayne County prosecutor’s office said this was because the robbery victim did not attend a March court hearing.
The arrest warrant “was appropriate based upon the facts,” the office said in a statement to HuffPost Monday.
Detroit Police Chief James E. White in a statement to HuffPost called the allegations presented in Woodruff’s lawsuit “very concerning” but said that he cannot comment further due to it being an ongoing investigation.
“We will provide further...
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