Beer Thief Nabbed with Help from Facial Recognition Tech...and Woody Harrelson

A Woody-Harrelson lookalike was recently nabbed by the NYPD for stealing beer…and Woody Harrelson’s face.

Police officers in New York City employed facial recognition and pictures of Woody Harrelson to track down the beer-thief who bore a striking resemblance to the actor.

Images of the thief captured on camera stealing beer from a CVS drug store were too grainy and pixelated to provide any matches to images of suspects held in the NYPD facial recognition database, according to reports.

However, noting the similarities between the criminal and Harrelson, a quick-thinking NYPD employee used a photo of the actor as a stand-in for the overly pixelated image captured at the CVS at the time of the beer heist. Using a photo of Harrelson, taken from 2012’s Hunger Games film where the actor had long hair that resembled the culprit’s, the NYPD found 11 matches, including the person eventually arrested for the theft.

It wasn’t Harrelson.

Naturally, the move has attracted criticism from all corners.

“The stakes are too high in criminal investigations to rely on unreliable — or wrong — inputs,” wrote researcher Clare Garvie. “It is one thing for a company to build a face recognition system designed to help individuals find their celebrity doppelganger,” she wrote. “It’s quite another to use these techniques to identify criminal suspects, who may be deprived of their liberty and ultimately prosecuted based on the match.”