A photograph of actor Woody Harrelson was used by police to catch a lookalike thief.
New York police noted that a suspect, caught on CCTV stealing beer from a local store, looked remarkably like the Natural Born Killers actor.
While the CCTV footage itself was too poor quality to run through the police’s facial recognition software, investigators instead decided to run a picture of Harrelson through their system in April 2017, which, according to a new report, returned several matches and led to one arrest.
According to ITV News, experts at Georgetown University’s centre on privacy and technology have argued that the use of Harrelson’s photo, as opposed to an image of the original suspect, has exposed flaws in the image recognition technology used to identify suspects.
Clare Garvie, a researcher at the centre, said: “The stakes are too high in criminal investigations to rely on unreliable – or wrong – inputs. It is one thing for a company to build a face recognition system designed to help individuals find their celebrity doppelganger or painting lookalike for entertainment purposes.”
“It’s quite another to use these techniques to identify criminal suspects, who may be deprived of their liberty and ultimately prosecuted based on the match.”
The New York Police Department said that their use of facial recognition was only used to find leads and would not be the sole basis for an arrest.
The report found that facial recognition technology has been used to solve an estimated 2,900 cases in more than five years.
The case has similarities to another beer theft that occurred in Blackpool, UK. A security clip of a suspect, who allegedly stole a crate of alcohol from a restaurant, bore a striking similarity to David Schwimmer, known for playing the character Ross on Friends.
After the clip went viral, Schwimmer himself posted a copycat video in which he appeared to furtively steal a crate of beer from a shop. He captioned the video: “Officers, I swear it wasn’t me. As you can see, I was in New York. To the hardworking Blackpool Police, good luck with the investigation.”
Lancashire police eventually arrested a 36-year-old man in London.
