CLEVELAND — It’s been called the biggest advancement in crime fighting since DNA: Facial recognition is being used in murder investigations. But also in lower-level crimes, like shoplifting.
People are familiar with facial recognition in daily life, unlocking cell phones and apps, and it’s even used in security lines at sports stadiums.
Middleburg Heights police used facial recognition in a shoplifting case.
“I would call it a success, I mean, what used to take us weeks, months, in some cases, we’d never get information. Now, it can be done in minutes,” Middleburg Heights Police Chief Robert Swanson said.
In the shoplifting case, police used the technology to help identify a man accused of shoplifting headsets from a store.
Officers ran images from store surveillance footage through Clearview AI.
It’s a search engine that indexes billions of pictures scraped from public social media accounts and mugshot websites.
The results were compared with a BMV photo.
Two weeks later, the man was arrested on a warrant after police say he returned to the same store wearing the same clothes.
“It’s not evidence, it’s not evidentiary. It’s just to give us direction,” Swanson said.
Facial recognition is also being used when the stakes are a lot higher, like a murder case out of Cleveland.
“Would you want your photograph mined off the internet, and all of a sudden you find you’re a potential suspect in a homicide case? That’s something I’d be concerned about,” criminal defense attorney Brian Fallon said.
In February 2024, the body of Blake Story was found in a bathtub. Investigators discovered he was shot in the back.
Facial recognition led police to Qeyeon Tolbert.
Brian Fallon is one of Tolbert’s defense attorneys.
“The issue is they used artificial intelligence for starters, it wasn’t really disclosed in the affidavit for the search warrant,” Fallon said.
Court records show a Cleveland police detective got a search warrant for Tolbert’s apartment after Tolbert popped on a facial recognition hit through the Northeast Ohio Regional Fusion Center from surveillance video from a store, five days after the murder.
Fallon called the warrant misleading as he fights Tolbert’s murder charge. The evidence collected was suppressed.
“Once I found out they used Clearview AI, I did some research. When I got the results finally from the prosecutor’s office, there was a disclaimer saying it’s not to be used in a court of law or any court filing,” Fallon said.
How often do police use facial recognition?
In Middleburg Heights, a suburb with a population of 15,000, searches didn’t just rise; they’ve exploded.
Police data shows that in 2025, 1,377 searches were conducted, almost 4 a day.
Most of the time for theft.
Swanson says multiple searches may be run for a single case due to multiple suspects and victims, or to submit several photos to obtain a usable result.
The police datasets showed columns for results and additional results.
Chief Swanson says the results are the strongest potential matches based on Clearview’s confidence scoring, and additional results are lower-confidence matches that may still have some similarities.
Middleburg Heights did not provide the names of the outside agencies that had requested searches.
Swanson says while most agencies use the Fusion Center, they are authorized under their licensing agreement to assist when needed.
Cuyahoga County also uses Clearview AI. The county has a one-year, $60,000 contract with the software company.
In nearly 6 months, there were 975 facial recognition searches, mostly for theft and fraud. They were run through the Fusion Center for 158 different police agencies, but officials refused to say which ones.
News 5 Investigators asked Fallon whether he thought Cleveland police should be transparent about how many times the department has used facial recognition, even with the Fusion Center.
“I would say yes, I think they have a duty to disclose that,” Fallon said.
Last month, we asked Public Safety Director Wayne Drummond if Cleveland uses facial recognition.
“It’s a technology, we’re not using it right now, but AI itself, that’s something we’ll vet out, but it’s not something we’re using right now,” Drummond said.
Even though it’s clear that a Cleveland detective used it in a murder case.
“The left hand may not know what the right hand is doing,” Fallon said.
Clearview AI would not speak with News 5 Investigators.
Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association President Nick DiCello says the folks who use the tech want to get it right for the sake of their cases.
“I think it’s an important tool, I mean, it’s an exciting technology in both directions, okay, it reminds me when DNA evidence came out and that was disruptive in many ways,” DiCello said.
But Fallon says there should be guardrails.
“Bring in a peer review, explain to us how this works, why is it reliable, why is it not reliable. Instead of passing the results through and kind of jamming it down everyone’s throat,” Fallon said.
Another concern is reliability.
Defense attorney Danny Tirfagnehu says he had a case in which facial recognition correctly identified one person in a bar fight but misidentified another.
In Middleburg Heights, one search gave them 284 leads, which could put hundreds of people under the microscope for no reason.
According to Cuyahoga County’s contract with Clearview AI, the company says many police agencies trust its product. But in the fine print, it says it can’t guarantee reliability and warns that it's to be used at your own risk.
