Metropolitan Police Department (Washington, D.C.)

A Metropolitan Police Department investigation into a non-fatal shooting on 8 June 2026 near Howard University led to the arrest of Marquis Foster, 43, on 1 July, charged with assault with intent to kill while armed. Investigators identified Foster by feeding surveillance footage from the crime scene into Clearview AI, which matches a submitted image against a database the company describes as holding public photographs scraped from social media and other websites. Sources differ on the database's scale: DC Witness, reporting directly from the court, states over 30 billion images; Biometric Update's coverage of the same proceedings states more than 70 billion. Both figures are reported here rather than resolved.

DC Superior Court Judge Neal Kravitz ordered prosecutors on 7 July 2026 to disclose to both the court and the defence exactly how the technology was used, after defence counsel Elizabeth Weller told the hearing she had not previously encountered the process. The parties were scheduled to reconvene on 22 July. The order does not itself rule on the admissibility or reliability of the identification; it compels disclosure of the identification pipeline, which civil liberties attorneys have described as an opaque, multi-step process that is difficult to challenge without exactly this kind of order.

This is reported as part of a wider pattern: US commentators identify at least eight documented wrongful arrests attributed to facial recognition in 2026, including cases in Florida and Nevada involving different vendors and forces, though the Foster case itself does not allege a wrongful identification, only seeks transparency into how the identification was made. No federal legislation comparable to the proposed Justice in Forensic Algorithms Act, which would mandate disclosure in criminal proceedings nationally, has passed.