Detroit Facial Recognition Use Drops 91% After Legal Settlement

Detroit police ran facial recognition searches nine times in 2025, a 91% drop from the 103 searches conducted in 2023, as a legal settlement tightened the rules for when and how the technology can be deployed.

The numbers come from a Board of Police Commissioners report and confirm a shift that started taking shape in 2024, when the department ran 28 searches. The Detroit Police Department told Bridge Detroit it doesn’t track whether any of those searches have led to arrests or convictions.

Only one of those nine searches produced an investigative lead last year. Three were connected to murders, three to aggravated assaults, and two to robberies. All nine requests were for Black males, a pattern that critics say reflects longstanding concerns about who bears the burden of this technology.

How it works

When DPD uses facial recognition, an officer submits a probe photo, typically a video still pulled from surveillance footage, and the software searches databases of mugshots and driver’s license photos for potential matches based on facial features and physical characteristics. The department has defended the tool as a way to generate investigative leads in violent crime and home invasion cases, not as evidence of guilt.

That’s a critical distinction. But it hasn’t quieted critics who have argued for years that the technology struggles to accurately identify Black and Brown faces, creating a real risk of misidentification.

Since DPD started using facial recognition in 2017, at least three lawsuits have been filed against the city over misidentification. A 2024 settlement in one of those cases forced policy changes designed to prevent the same mistakes from happening again. Those new procedures appear to be the main reason usage dropped so sharply.

A $1 million purchase, years without a policy

Detroit police bought the software from South Carolina-based DataWorks Plus for $1 million in 2017. The department used it for nearly two years without any governing policy, drawing intense public scrutiny. Former police chief James Craig eventually proposed the department’s first formal policy, and the Board of Police Commissioners approved it.

Even with that policy in place, the problems didn’t stop. The three lawsuits followed, and the settlements that came with them added layers of oversight and restriction.

The contrast with earlier use is striking. In 2020, DPD submitted 115 search requests. Sixty percent of those returned a possible match, according to a BOPC report. That year, 67 requests were connected to aggravated assaults, 37 to robberies, and three to murders. All but four of the unidentified individuals in those searches were Black, and the majority were male.

Nine searches. That’s what 2025 looked like.

“Last resort”

Victoria Camille, the Board of Police Commissioners member for District 7, said the decline is exactly what oversight bodies have been pushing for. “If it’s not being used, hardly at all, that’s a good thing. It’s something we really want to reserve for the last resort,” Camille told Bridge Detroit at a community policing event held at the University of Michigan Detroit Center.

Her framing matters here. The Detroit Police Department’s facial recognition policy has long described the tool as a lead-generating instrument, not a standalone identifier. But in practice, the gap between policy language and street-level application created the conditions for the misidentification cases that triggered the lawsuits.

The ACLU of Michigan, which has tracked DPD’s use of the technology and pushed for stricter controls, has argued that even a single wrongful arrest driven by a bad facial recognition match is one too many. The 2024 settlement put concrete restrictions in place to close that gap.

What the department still can’t answer is whether any of the searches it has run over the years actually produced an arrest, let alone a conviction. DPD said it doesn’t have that data. That’s a significant accountability gap for a technology the city has spent years defending and over $1 million to acquire, and it’s the kind of gap that community oversight groups will keep pressing to fill.

The Board of Police Commissioners holds its next public meeting where policy compliance is typically reviewed. Civil rights advocates have said they plan to continue monitoring whether the drop in facial recognition use holds through the rest of 2026, and whether the department’s reporting improves enough to actually track outcomes.