A Florida man he was wrongly arrested for attempting to seize a child illegally after the police relied on a facial recognition an incorrect match, according to the lawsuit filed Wednesday, even though he lived more than 300 miles from the scene and says he has never set foot in the city where the crime took place.
Robert Dillon, a 52-year-old businessman from Fort Myers, was arrested after FACES—a facial recognition system operated by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office—matched his face against a photo of a man on a computer screen captured by a cell phone. The system returned “a 93 percent match on facial expressions,” according to police investigation notes. The scores it gives represent the amount of two images that are similar to the algorithm. It is not likely to show the same person.
FACES contains tens of millions of Florida mugshots and driver’s license images and is one of the longest-running 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 transported in a locked, dark car. He pledged the title to his truck to make a bond. His arrest came during peak stone crab season, causing him to default on his rent and nearly lose his home. His mugshot remained online for nearly a year, removed from the county’s website only after a TV reporter intervened.
Visitors approach Dillon in public to ask about the case, the complaint says, and he no longer feels comfortable talking to 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 12 years old and repeatedly asked her to leave with him. He refused. When he approached her a second time, she called her mother. The man left before the police arrived.
The complaint lays out several factors that pointed away from Dillon and never reached the judge who signed the warrant for his arrest. The McDonald’s manager told investigators the suspect was a “regular customer” he had seen there many times. According to the complaint, Dillon never visited Jacksonville Beach, living hundreds of miles away.
The Jacksonville Beach police officer assigned to the case sent a tip about the attempted identification to neighboring agencies later that November using cellphone photos of McDonald’s surveillance footage. A Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office (JSO) sergeant ran the photo through FACES and returned a “93 percent match” to Dillon’s name. The investigating officer then requested a search of the license plate readers of two vehicles registered to Dillon, including the days surrounding the incident. Neither got anywhere in the county, according to the complaint, which says the results were removed from the warrant application.
Six months passed without further investigation, the complaint states. In July 2024, the officer submitted the document. The judge signed off, and Dillon was arrested the following month. He retained a criminal defense attorney and, that October, pleaded not guilty. The State Attorney’s Office dropped all charges a few weeks later. The investigating officer was however promoted till the end of the year.
“I will never get over how scared and worried I was, wondering if I would ever go home to my wife and daughter again,” Dillon said in a statement shared by his attorneys. “More than a year later, I’m still taking parts of my life, all because the police relied on this dangerous technology instead of doing their job and investigating.”
