Amazon Rekognition faces scrutiny in false arrest lawsuit Amazon Web Services (AWS) was added as a defendant in a federal lawsuit brought by a St. Louis, Missouri man who spent 17 months in jail after police used facial recognition on a poor quality image of a masked suspect and then built a case around the photo. Christopher Gatlin alleges in an amended complaint filed last Thursday that his arrest and prosecution resulted from poor police work, inadequate training, misconduct and a defective facial recognition system developed by Amazon. The new filing names AWS and identifies Amazon Rekognition as the technology involved in the identification that ultimately led police to Gatlin. The addition of Amazon significantly broadens this civil rights case that until now has focused largely on how St. Louis and county police used facial recognition and what they did after it identified Gatlin as a possible match. The case began with the December 7, 2020, assault of a MetroLink security guard at the St. Charles Rock Road station in north St. Louis County. The victim suffered a traumatic brain injury and repeatedly told police he could not remember the men who attacked him, according to allegations recounted in a federal court ruling. Detectives obtained surveillance video showing the attackers. One investigator eventually submitted an image of one of them to the St. Louis Mugshot Recognition Technology system. The federal court record describes the image as grainy, blurry, taken from a distance and from above the suspect’s face. A hood covered part of his forehead and a medical mask obscured another portion of his face. The system nevertheless returned possible candidates, including Gatlin. Before the facial recognition search, investigators had no information pointing to him as a suspect. The Washington Post subsequently found that the regional St. Louis facial recognition