Bangladeshi-origin software engineer Alvi Chowdhury was arrested at his home in Southampton last month and held for 10 hours after facial recognition software mistakenly identified him as the suspect in a robbery in Milton Keynes, 100 miles away.
Chaudhry told The Guardian that he was confused when the police knocked on his door and arrested him while he was working. When he saw CCTV footage of the robbery, he felt angry because the perpetrator did not look like him at all. Chaudhry, who grew a beard, said: “I was very angry, because the child looked about 10 years younger than me.” “Everything was different. The skin was lighter. The suspect looked about 18 years old. His nose was bigger. His nose was bigger.”
He had no facial hair. His eyes were different. His lips were smaller than mine.“I assumed that the investigating officer saw that I was a dark-haired person and decided to arrest me.”Chaudhry said officers at Hampshire Police Station laughed when he asked them: “Does this look like me?”He added: “They knew I was not the suspect after looking at the suspect’s footage and looking at my photo.”
Chaudhry’s photo was in the system because he had been arrested once in 2021 which he called an unlawful arrest. He said he was attacked one night at a university in Portsmouth. He was released and the case was not pursued. But now he’s afraid his profile picture will be back in the system, and now if a brown person in Scotland robs a bank, they’ll come after him. Chaudhary demands damages from the police for arresting him from his home which led to a whole scene where his neighbors saw him being led away in handcuffs.
Police claim wrongful arrest but no racial bias
Thames Valley Police admitted the arrest was wrong but maintained it was not due to any racial bias. A police spokesman told the Guardian: “While we apologize for the distress caused to the complainant in this case, his arrest was based on a visual assessment by investigating officers that the person matched the suspect in the CCTV footage after the retrospective facial recognition match, and was not affected by racial profiling.”
