ACLU sues Bloomington police and Hennepin County over mistaken-identity arrest

A 19-year-old who was detained for five days in a case of mistaken identity in Bloomington in 2021 is suing city police and Hennepin County in federal court.

The American Civil Liberties Union announced the lawsuit filed Wednesday afternoon, with plaintiff Kylese Perryman alleging his constitutional rights were violated when he was detained, based on what appears to have been faulty facial recognition software that matched Perryman to footage of a suspect in a carjacking and robbery. Perryman little resembled the robber, who had a different hairstyle, different tattoos and a vastly different body type.

"My whole family tree's been through this. I hope my kids don't have to go through this," Perryman, who is Black, said at a news conference Tuesday. "That's why I'm part of this lawsuit. I'm trying to change things for my kids' generation."

The suit, seeking at least $250,000 in costs and damages, names the city of Bloomington and Hennepin County as defendants, along with unnamed employees and Bloomington police detective Andrew Risdall. Bloomington declined to comment on the suit, but a city spokeswoman said Risdall is still a detective.

According to a criminal complaint signed by Risdall, someone stole a car on Sept. 3, 2021, and robbed a woman in a Mall of America parking ramp the next day, hitting her on the head with a handgun.

Bloomington police got surveillance footage from the mall. About an hour later, someone who looked the same as the robber used a stolen credit card at a Brooklyn Center Walmart, also captured on surveillance video.

Perryman was misidentified as the robber by Hennepin County investigators, even though he is around 5 inches taller and much thinner than the man seen in surveillance videos. Perryman has a tattoo on his forearm, while the robber did not, and the two wore their hair differently.

It was not clear, according to the ACLU's complaint, how exactly the faulty identification was made — if Hennepin County criminal information sharing and analysis staff used facial-recognition software, which is less accurate when identifying Black people's faces, or if a human comparing Perryman's booking photo to the surveillance video made the match.

When it was decided Perryman was the robber, he was detained by a state trooper after he was pulled over for expired tabs on a Friday in late September 2021 and brought to the Bloomington Police Department. Perryman was held there over the weekend and not charged until that Tuesday, almost five days later.

In jail and on home confinement in the months that followed, Perryman said he missed a friend's funeral and his grandmother's memorial, and he had to seek special permission to be present for the birth of his son.

"I was sitting in jail, sick to my stomach," he said, trying to figure out how he could prove his innocence. Family members paid his bail and helped him hire an attorney.

Hennepin County prosecutors dropped the charges only two months later, after Perryman's attorney showed he was clocked in at work at his warehouse job when the carjacking took place, asleep at home after his night shift when the woman was robbed at the Mall of America and at a family member's birthday party in Andover when the stolen cards were used at Walmart.

Attorney Molly Jean Given of Nelson Mullins, which is working with the ACLU on the suit, said basic investigation should have ruled Perryman out right away. It should have been easy, she said, to use cellphone location data that Perryman offered police to determine he was not the carjacker or robber.

Perryman's constitutional rights were violated by "careless investigation and apathetic prosecuting attorneys," Given said. "What happened to Mr. Perryman is truly alarming."

"The idea that law enforcement can arrest someone, detain them in jail," said ACLU Legal Director Teresa Nelson, "because police think they look like the suspect is absolutely appalling."