A grainy surveillance image and an AI algorithm were all it took for agents of the state to steal 17 months of Chris Gatlin’s life.
“That knock that came on the door blew me away because I wasn’t expecting it to be the police,” Gatlin recounted in an interview with FOX2 News about the moment agents invaded his home, initiating a 17-month nightmare in what officials euphemistically call the “St. Louis County Justice Center” – in reality, a site of Black containment and control.
Documents and bodycam footage reveal how St. Louis police, armed with facial recognition technology, targeted Gatlin for arrest without investigation or corroborating evidence.
The case files expose what can only be described as corruption, and a blatant pattern of police coercion designed to manufacture guilt. The alleged victim twice identified different suspects and explicitly warned officers about his compromised state: “I was in and out of consciousness” and “I don’t want to put the wrong person in jail.” Yet agents pressed forward, directing him to focus on “characteristics” and “complexion” – barely coded language for racial profiling.
Attorney Jack Waldron, who is suing on Gatlin’s behalf, detailed how quickly police moved to arrest based solely on AI: “The first image that popped up was of Chris, my client, and they took it. They ran with it, and they said, ‘This is our guy,’ without doing any other investigation.”
“It was more like I felt I was being pointed into something,” the witness later revealed, describing the psychological manipulation tactics that produced a false identification.
For 17 months, the state apparatus – from police to prosecutors – suppressed crucial bodycam footage exposing these coercive tactics. Only when this evidence finally surfaced did prosecutors dismiss the case, claiming ignorance of its existence – a familiar strategy of plausible deniability in cases of wrongful imprisonment.
While Gatlin has secured his physical freedom, the agents responsible face no consequences. Instead, cops actively defend expanding these technologies of racial control. Former assistant police chief Ron Martin praised AI surveillance as “more of a benefit than a hindrance” – deliberately ignoring how these tools perpetuate centuries of anti-Black violence.
Gatlin’s case represents the latest chapter in America’s unbroken history of criminalizing, surveilling, and caging Black folks. As the state apparatus increasingly deploys AI surveillance tools without oversight or accountability, they strengthen rather than disrupt these foundational systems of racial capitalism.
