Detroit Cops Misused ALPR Tech To Seize An Innocent Person’s Car For Three Weeks

The Detroit PD is a case study in misuse of powerful surveillance tech. The department is notable for being involved in no less than three wrongful arrests, due to misuse/abuse of its facial recognition tech. The city has already paid out a $300,000 settlement in one of these cases. Worse, two of the three cases involve the same so-called “detective,” which means one of their investigators should definitely never be allowed to use the tech again.

These arrests are the result of ignoring the guidance that surrounds the tech. The tech provider warns facial recognition matches should not be used as the sole probable cause for arrest warrants. The PD’s policies say the same thing. And yet, there have been multiple wrongful arrests because investigators ignored these policies and procedures, including one who’s done this at least twice.

Now, there’s another misuse of surveillance tech that’s making the wrong kind of headlines for the Detroit Police Department. Automatic license plate readers capture hundreds of millions of plate/location images across the country every day. These are automatically searched against hot lists of vehicles tied to criminal activity.

This is an efficiency gain — one that allows officers to more with less legwork. But it also accelerates the error rate, something that has also been linked to wrongful stops and arrests. That the Detroit PD would also be misusing this tech isn’t a surprise. The bigger surprise might be that the Detroit PD specifically allows officers to engage in this misuse. This is from Paul Egan’s article for the Detroit Free Press, which details yet another tech-enabled screwup by the Detroit PD.

A Detroit police spokesperson said officers are authorized to use license plate readers in reverse, when they have a vehicle description but no partial license plate number.

That’s not responsible use of this tech. This is nothing more than a policy-enabled fishing expedition, which allows investigators to surf the database for suspects, using nothing more than speedy guesswork to find a “suspect.”

This case — which has resulted in a lawsuit — is even worse. Investigators didn’t even have a partial plate number. All they had was a vehicle description. So, they googled the haystack until they found a car to stop, assuming whoever was in it must be the criminal they were looking for. They were wrong, but that didn’t stop them from sending a bunch of officers to this person’s house, throwing her 2-year-old child into a cruiser while they cuffed her and, basically, stealing her car.

Acting on information drawn from its multi-million-dollar network of license plate readers, Detroit police handcuffed Isoke Robinson, put her 2-year-old son, who has autism, in the back of a police cruiser, and seized and impounded her only car for more than three weeks.

But witnesses to the Sept. 3, 2023, drive-by shooting police were investigating never gave officers even a partial license plate number.

And the man later convicted in the nonfatal shooting has no known connection to Robinson or her 2013 Dodge Charger. Robinson, who had to borrow someone’s truck to keep her job as an assembly line worker at Stellantis and has sued the city in federal court, was never charged with a crime or even identified as a suspect.

Based on nothing more than a reverse image search (so to speak), officers took Robinson off the road, out of her car, and traumatized her son. The testimony given by officers in the lawsuit makes it clear no one was handling anything professionally or responsibly. The plate reader cops looked at was two miles from the crime scene but only a couple of blocks from where Robinson lived. (She has since moved out of Detroit.)

On top of that, images of the suspect vehicle obtained from nearby private CCTV cameras showed something an actual investigator might have attempted to verify before prematurely declaring victory over crime just because they’d take an innocent woman’s car. Those images showed a Dodge Charger with only a single working fog light. Despite holding onto Robinson’s car for three weeks, no one bothered to take another look at the car cops were carelessly claiming was evidence.

Detroit Police Detective Dion Corbin, Jr., who was in charge of the shooting investigation, testified in an Aug. 14 deposition that the entire time police had Robinson’s vehicle impounded, they never checked to see whether both her fog lights were working, or not. They also never tested the car for potentially relevant evidence, such as gunpowder residue, Corbin testified.

These people don’t deserve the title of “detective” or “investigator.” They’re doing neither of these things. They’re just finding the simplest, most effort-free “solution” to their problem. And, by doing so, they’re neither finding criminals, nor are they making Detroit any safer. While they’re impounding cars and throwing toddlers into cop cars, the real criminals are still out there, avoiding arrest by doing nothing more than existing alongside officers who can’t be bothered to take their own work seriously.