A Bangladeshi-origin software engineer, Alvi Choudhury, was arrested at his Southampton home last month and was detained for 10 hours after a facial recognition software mistakenly identified him as the suspect of a burglary in Milton Keynes, 100 miles away.
Choudhury told the Guardian that he was confused when police knocked on his door and arrested him while he was working. And when he saw the CCTV footage of the burglary, he was enraged as the culprit looked nothing like him. “I was very angry, because the kid looked about 10 years younger than me,” said Choudhury, who wears a beard. “Everything was different. Skin was lighter. Suspect looked 18 years old. His nose was bigger.
He had no facial hair. His eyes were different. His lips were smaller than mine.“I just assumed that the investigative officer saw that I was a brown person with curly hair and decided to arrest me.”Choudhury said that officers at the Hampshire police station laughed when he asked them: “Does this look anything like me?”He added: “They knew I wasn’t the suspect after looking at footage of the suspect and looking at my picture”.
Choudhury’s mugshot was in the system because he had been arrested once in 2021 which he called a wrongful arrest. He said he had been attacked on a night out at a university in Portsmouth. He was released and the case had no further follow-up. But now he is scared that his mugshot is again in the system and now if a brown person in Scotland robs a bank, they are going to come after him. Choudhury is claiming damages from the police for arresting him from his house making a full spectacle as his neighbors saw him being led away in handcuffs.
Wrong arrest but no racial bias, claims police
The Thames Valley police acknowledged that the arrest was wrong but asserted that it was not because of any racial bias. “While we apologise for the distress caused to the complainant in this case, their arrest was based on the investigating officers’ own visual assessment that the individual matched the suspect in CCTV footage following a retrospective facial recognition match, and was not influenced by racial profiling,” a police spokesperson told the Guardian.
