NYPD facial recognition match leads to wrongful arrest of Trevis Williams
Two independent outlets report that NYPD used facial recognition to arrest Trevis Williams, despite height and location discrepancies, leading to jail time before charges were dismissed; advocacy groups are pushing for policy changes.
Records by entity: New York Police Department
NYPD's facial recognition led to the wrongful arrest of Trevis Williams; charges were later dismissed and advocacy groups called for reforms.
A false facial recognition match led NYPD to arrest Trevis Williams despite height and location discrepancies.
Key facts
- What
- Two independent outlets report that NYPD used facial recognition to arrest Trevis Williams, despite height and location discrepancies, leading to jail time before charges were dismissed; advocacy groups are pushing for policy changes.
- Incident date
- Apr 1, 2025
- Who
- New York Police Department
- Failure mode
- Hallucination
- AI surface
- Computer Vision
- Severity
- Medium
What happened
In April 2025, Trevis Williams was arrested by NYPD following a facial recognition match to a February 2025 Union Square incident. He was eight inches taller than the alleged suspect and was miles away from the crime scene at the time. Williams was jailed for two nights before the charges were dismissed. The reporting has prompted calls to ban or restrict the NYPD’s facial recognition use.
What broke inside the model
The facial recognition system produced a false positive that the NYPD treated as primary evidence, despite height and location discrepancies. Officers relied on this match to justify arrest and detention before dismissal of charges.
What it cost
Sources
- PressNYPD facial recognition dismissal of casenytimes.com
- PressMan falsely jailed by NYPD's facial recognition surveillance tech failedabc7ny.com
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/nypd-facial-recognition-incident-wrongfully-arrestsAI Failure Index. "NYPD facial recognition match leads to wrongful arrest of Trevis Williams" (FI-0256). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/nypd-facial-recognition-incident-wrongfully-arrests (indexed Jun 5, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0256. Full dataset at /data.
Note from Realm Labs, the Index steward
How Realm fits
- Prism
- OmniGuard
- AI Detection & Response (AIDR)
This entry sits in the index's predictive wing: a system that scores, ranks, perceives, or steers rather than generates. Realm's runtime layer is built for the generative and agentic systems now moving into these same decision seats, where it watches a model's internal state and holds an unsupported claim or an unchecked action before it commits. The control gap on this record, an automated decision that reached people with no runtime check in front of it, is the same gap. The index keeps predictive failures on the record because the pattern carries straight into the systems shipping today.