wrongful arrest – A Florida man says a face-recognition system produced an inaccurate match that helped lead to his arrest for attempting to lure a child—despite him living more than 300 miles away. The lawsuit alleges investigators missed key facts, Dillon spent a night detain
By shortly before midnight on November 2, 2023, Robert Dillon was already nowhere near the scene that would later place him at the center of a criminal case.
Dillon. a 52-year-old commercial crabber from Fort Myers. says he had never set foot in the city where the alleged attempt to lure a child happened. Yet a lawsuit filed in Florida on Wednesday says police relied on a face-recognition match that was inaccurate—and. in the process. pointed investigators away from the evidence they could have checked.
The incident, prosecutors allege, took place at a McDonald’s in Jacksonville Beach. A man approached a girl under 12 and repeatedly asked her to leave with him. She refused. After he approached her a second time, she called for her mother. The man left before police arrived.
In the days that followed, investigators used FACES, a face-recognition system operated by Florida’s Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. FACES holds tens of millions of Florida mug shots and driver’s license photos and is one of the longest-running police face-recognition databases in the United States. In this case. the system returned a “93 percent match on facial features.” The scores it emits. according to the lawsuit’s explanation of how the tool works. represent how much two images look alike to the algorithm—not how likely it is that they show the same person.
The suit says Dillon was arrested after that “93 percent match” matched his face to a man on a computer screen. Police-investigatory notes, as described in the complaint, say the photo was taken with a cell phone. Dillon was arrested at his home in Fort Myers in front of his wife. according to the American Civil Liberties Union. which filed the lawsuit. He was held overnight in a cold cell and transported in a caged, unlit van.
Dillon says his mug shot stayed online for nearly a year—removed from the county website only after a TV reporter intervened. The complaint also alleges that because of the case, strangers began approaching him in public to ask about it, and he no longer feels comfortable talking to children.
The timeline detailed in the lawsuit makes the arrest feel less like a fast, evidence-driven decision and more like a shortcut that never got corrected.
A Jacksonville Beach police officer assigned to the case sent an attempt-to-identify bulletin to surrounding agencies later that November using cell phone photos of the McDonald’s surveillance footage. A sergeant with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office (JSO) ran the images through FACES and sent back the “93 percent match” to Dillon’s name. After that. the investigating officer requested a search of license plate readers for two vehicles registered to Dillon. covering the days around the incident. The complaint says neither vehicle turned up anywhere in the county. and that those results were omitted from the warrant application.
Even more damning to the lawsuit’s narrative: Dillon lived more than 300 miles from Jacksonville Beach and says he had never visited. A manager at the McDonald’s told investigators the suspect was a “regular customer” she had seen there multiple times. according to the complaint. The lawsuit argues these facts pointed away from Dillon and never reached the judge who signed the warrant for his arrest.
Six months passed with no further investigation, the complaint says. In July 2024, the officer submitted the warrant. A judge signed it, and Dillon was arrested the following month.
He retained a criminal defense attorney and, that October, pleaded not guilty. Then, a few weeks later, the State Attorney’s Office dropped all charges. Even with the case dismissed, the lawsuit says the investigating officer was promoted by the end of the year.
Dillon’s lawyers shared a statement in which he described the fear of the moment and the slow grind that followed: “I will never get over how terrified and worried I was. wondering if I’d ever go home to my wife and daughter again. ” Dillon said. “Over a year later. I’m still picking up the pieces of my life. all because the police relied on this dangerous technology instead of doing their jobs and actually investigating.”.
During peak stone crab season, the lawsuit says the arrest caused Dillon to fall behind on rent and nearly lose his home—turning an algorithmic match into a personal financial crisis that lingered long after the courtroom cleared him.
face recognition wrongful arrest FACES Pinellas County Sheriff's Office Jacksonville Beach ACLU lawsuit cybersecurity policing technology biometrics
Face match sounds like total nonsense honestly.
If he’s 300 miles away and still got arrested off a “93% match,” that’s wild. Like how is that not obviously wrong?
They’re saying 93 percent match is just “similar features” not same person, but why would they even use that number at all then? Also I feel like cops probably had other stuff and just blamed the tech after. Not sure though, the article cuts off.
So a crabber from Fort Myers gets tagged because a computer said he looks like someone else at a McDonald’s in Jacksonville Beach?? That feels like they just wanted a guy and the system did the pointing for them. And the “93%” part… that sounds like a probability, not just likeness, but I guess I’m reading it wrong. Either way, if they missed obvious facts because of the match then that’s messed up.