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Florida man He was wrongfully arrested for attempting to illegally entice a child after police relied on a Face recognition The match was inaccurate, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday, even though he lived more than 300 miles away from the scene and says he never set foot in the city where the crime occurred.
Robert Dillon, a 52-year-old commercial crabber from Fort Myers, was arrested after FACES — a facial recognition system run by Florida’s Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office — matched his face to an image of a man on a computer screen captured on a cell phone. The system returned “a 93 percent match of facial features,” according to police investigative notes. The scores it emits represent how similar the two images are to the algorithm. They are not likely to appear as the same person.
FACES holds tens of millions of photographs and Florida driver’s license images, and is one of the oldest police facial 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, held overnight in a cold cell, and then transported in an unlit truck. He pledged ownership of his truck to post bond. The arrest came during the height of stone crab season, causing him to fall behind on his rent and nearly lose his home. His photo remained online for nearly a year, and was only removed from the district’s website after a television reporter intervened.
Strangers would approach Dillon in public to ask about the case, and he no longer felt comfortable talking to the children, the complaint says.
The incident occurred shortly before midnight on November 2, 2023, at a McDonald’s restaurant in Jacksonville Beach, where a man allegedly approached a girl under the age of 12 and repeatedly asked her to leave with him. I refused. After he approached her a second time, she called her mother. The man left before police arrived.
The complaint details several facts that pointed away from Dillon and never reached 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 she had seen there several times. According to the complaint, Dillon has never visited Jacksonville Beach, where he lives hundreds of miles away.
The Jacksonville Beach police officer assigned to the case sent out a bulletin to attempt to identify surrounding agencies later that November using cellphone images from McDonald’s surveillance footage. A Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office (JSO) sergeant checked the photos through FACES and sent 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 accident. Neither appeared anywhere in the county, according to the complaint, which says the findings were omitted from the arrest warrant application.
Six months passed without further investigation, the complaint says. In July 2024, the officer served the arrest warrant. A judge signed it, and Dillon was arrested the following month. He retained a criminal defense attorney and, in October of that year, pleaded not guilty. The State Attorney’s Office dropped all charges a few weeks later. However, the investigating officer was promoted by the end of the year.
“I will never get over how terrified and anxious I felt, wondering if I would ever return home to my wife and daughter again,” Dillon said in a statement shared by his attorneys. “More than a year later, I’m still getting my life together, all because the police relied on this dangerous technology instead of doing their job and actually investigating.”
