A Fort Myers man and the ACLU of Florida are suing Jacksonville Beach for relying too heavily on an artificial intelligence program that fingered him as a suspect in a now-dropped 2023 child luring investigation. The ACLU said in a 66-page federal lawsuit that Robert Dillon had been arrested “for a crime he never committed in a city he’d never been to.” Dillon filed suit against the Jacksonville Beach Police Department and the Jacksonville and Pinellas Sheriff’s offices on Wednesday in a case centering around what the ACLU calls a “faulty facial recognition match” in 2023 and an arrest eight months later. The now-dropped charges claimed that Dillon, a commercial crabber from Fort Myers, tried to lure a child at a McDonald’s in Jacksonville Beach, five hours from his home. “The night I spent in jail after they arrested me for a crime I did not commit still haunts me to this day. I will never get over how terrified and worried I was, wondering if I’d ever go home to my wife and daughter again,” Dillon said in a news release. Dillon’s attorneys explain that law enforcement put security camera footage into facial recognition technology operated by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, comparing the image to millions of photos in a database to find matches. It returned a 93% match to an image of Dillon. “Over a year later, I’m still picking up the pieces of my life, all because the police relied on this dangerous technology instead of doing their jobs and actually investigating,” Dillon said. “Florida police must implement safeguards and ensure this never happens to anyone else, because until they do, nobody is safe.” The 2023 investigation centered on the idea that the suspect was a regular at the McDonald’s and that witnesses picked a picture