Commercial crabber Robert Dillon, 52, of Fort Myers, was arrested after FACES, the face-recognition system operated by Florida’s Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, matched his face with a photo of a man on a computer screen taken from a cell phone. According to police-investigation notes, the system returned a “93 percent match on facial features”. The scores it emits indicate how similar two images look to the algorithm. How unlikely it is that they show the same person.
FACES has 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.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit, says Dillon was arrested at his home in front of his wife, kept in a cold cell overnight and transported in a caged, unlit van. He mortgaged the ownership of his truck to make the bond. The arrest occurred during peak stone crab season, causing him to fall behind on rent and nearly lose his home. His mug shot remained online for almost a year, being removed from the county website only after the intervention of a TV reporter.
The complaint states that strangers approach Dillon in public to ask about the case and that he no longer feels comfortable talking to the children.
The incident occurred shortly before midnight on November 2, 2023, at a McDonald’s in Jacksonville Beach, where a man allegedly approached a girl under the age of 12 and repeatedly asked her to go with him. He denied. When he came to her the second time, she called her mother. The person left the place before the police arrived.
The complaint cites several facts that point to Dillon never reaching the judge who signed the warrant for his arrest. A manager at the McDonald’s told investigators that the suspect was a “regular customer” whom he had seen there several times. According to the complaint, Dillon had never visited Jacksonville Beach, despite living hundreds of miles away.
A Jacksonville Beach police officer assigned to the case sent a bulletin to nearby agencies in late November attempting to identify McDonald’s using cell phone photos from surveillance footage. A sergeant with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office (JSO) ran the images through FACES and sent back a “93 percent match” to Dillon’s name. The investigating officer then requested a search of license plate readers for two vehicles registered to Dillon, covering the days surrounding the incident. Neither of them appeared anywhere in the county, according to the complaint, which says the results were removed from the warrant application.
The complaint states that six months passed and no investigation was done. The officer submitted the warrant in July 2024. A judge signed off on it and Dillon was arrested the next month. He retained a criminal defense attorney and, in October, pleaded not guilty. The State Attorney’s Office dropped all charges a few weeks later. Yet by the end of the year the investigating officer was promoted.
“I will never get over how terrified and anxious I was, wondering if I would ever get home to my wife and daughter,” Dillon said in a statement shared by his lawyers. “More than 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 job and actually investigating.”
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