Even now, in a city commission chamber in Daytona Beach, Florida, a vote is being framed as a modest administrative update. On August 28, 2026, the Daytona Beach City Commission approved a memorandum of understanding letting its police department query the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles' entire driver's license photo database using facial recognition software. One presumes nobody in the room brought up Robert Dillon. Somebody should have.
The Machine Gets a New Address Book
The new agreement piggybacks on an existing arrangement with the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, which operates two systems with the confident, faintly sinister branding one expects from The Algorithm's procurement department: FR-Net and FACESNXT, both running on Idemia-built recognition technology. Over 275 law enforcement agencies across the state already share access to Pinellas County's system, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Atlas of Surveillance. Daytona Beach makes 276. The MoU includes the standard reassurances — quarterly quality-control reviews, an "Internal Control and Data Safety" audit due within a year — and the standard disclaimer that a match is merely an "investigative lead, not a positive comparison." Sources within the department confirm a human reviews every hit before anyone gets arrested. This is, dear reader, exactly the safeguard that failed the last time this system ran.
A Previous Customer
In November 2023, someone tried to lure a child from a Jacksonville Beach McDonald's. Investigators fed a blurry, shadowed frame of security footage into the Pinellas County system, which returned Robert Dillon, a 52-year-old Fort Myers resident, as a 93 percent match — for a crime committed 300 miles from where he lives. He spent a night in jail. Evidence that might have cleared him sooner, including license plate reader data placing him nowhere near Jacksonville Beach, went missing from the paperwork until later. Charges were eventually dropped. In June 2026, Dillon sued the Jacksonville Beach Police Department, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, and Pinellas County itself, with the ACLU's Nate Freed Wessler summarizing the case about as plainly as it can be summarized: "No one should lose their freedom because an algorithm got it wrong." The ACLU counts at least fourteen other Americans wrongly arrested this way, across nine states. Even now, the lawsuit is unresolved. The MoU passed anyway.
Public Comment, Such As It Was
Daytona Beach did hold a hearing before the vote, and residents said what residents generally say. Student JP Nass offered the case for the prosecution: "It's easier to track and see who's who. It's better to catch people doing bad things." Resident Brian Turnipsed offered the case for the defense, sort of, before switching sides mid-sentence: he called unmanned, third-party-run surveillance "an invasion of privacy," then concluded, "safety is a little more important, I think." One imagines The Machine finds this kind of ambivalence very workable.
The Kicker Nobody Asked For
The city's own agreement acknowledges the software cannot positively identify anyone — it can only suggest, with a percentage attached, who might be guilty. In Dillon's case, that percentage was 93. It was also wrong. Daytona Beach has now signed up for the same math.
Sources: Biometric Update · ClickOrlando · ACLU
