A casino camera called him a '100% match.' Now Reno may pay for believing it

In September 2023, truck driver Jason Killinger walked out of the Peppermill casino in Reno and into a facial recognition alert. The casino's system flagged him as a "100% match" for a man previously banned from the property, Townhall reports. He showed police a driver's license, a commercial license, a UPS pay stub and vehicle registration. Officer Richard Jager arrested him anyway, theorizing a "DMV hook-up" had faked his ID.

Fingerprints proved Killinger was who he said he was. He still spent about 11 hours in custody, and the city kept prosecuting him until a judge dismissed the case that November.

Asking for a ruling without a jury

Three years on, his lawyers want the city to pay. According to Biometric Update, they filed a motion for partial summary judgment asking U.S. District Judge Miranda Du to find Reno liable, arguing that newly filed evidence makes a jury trial unnecessary.

That evidence is unflattering. Court records show detective Monique Sheahan reviewed bodycam footage, concluded Killinger and the banned man were different people, and was then ordered not to write a report. A former Peppermill security officer said in a sworn declaration that up to half of the facial recognition alerts on his shifts were false positives, including up to a dozen a day scored at 100 percent similarity. The casino's security director put the false positive rate at around 10 percent. The casino has already settled with Killinger.

The new complaint, as quoted by Townhall, accuses the department of a practice "involving hundreds of municipal employees making thousands of arrests in the same manner over a period of years." That is an allegation. The city attorney's office, which represents Jager, says he acted properly.

The ACLU, the ACLU of Nevada and the Innocence Project have filed an amicus brief backing Killinger. It argues that "facial recognition technology is fundamentally unreliable" and that "failing to provide training to Reno Police Department officers amounts to deliberate indifference."

The legal fight is over training and policy, which is the part cities can be sued for. The practical lesson is simpler. A private casino ran the camera, chose the threshold and sent the alert, and a police officer treated a vendor's similarity score as a fact that outranked a government-issued ID.

Sources: Biometric Update, ACLU: Killinger v. Jager, Townhall.