Have you seen this face? SC cops had, and facial recognition software led to arrest
Two brothers were arrested on multiple charges stemming from a carjacking attempt after one of them was identified through facial recognition software, according to the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office.
It is the latest arrest the sheriff’s office has made thanks to the software program, Lt. Ryan Flood said Monday in an interview with The State.
“We got it in August and we use it a lot,” Flood said. “We’ve used it in several cases.”
The most recent example involved the arrests of brothers Charles Lee Pressley, Jr. and Brian Lee Pressley, who are suspects in a robbery and carjacking, according to a news release from the sheriff’s office.
The carjacking occurred outside of an Upstate South Carolina liquor store, according to the news release. Video surveillance captured images of Brian Pressley, which were fed into the software program and “an extremely accurate” match was made, Flood told The State.
Flood said the image had to be high clarity, otherwise it would not have worked with the facial recognition program. He added the program works in a similar fashion to fingerprint analysis software.
Because the quality of the video surveillance was good enough, it was able to be used in the software that compared it to criminal mug shots and the Department of Motor Vehicles database, which is a much larger database, according to Flood.
Before the sheriff’s office got this software, created by Greenville company DataWorks Plus, it had to rely on the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division to access information from the DMV, Flood said.
“It potentially provides us with information we haven’t received from the public,” Flood said.
It led to the arrest of the Pressley brothers, who confronted a woman in her car on Dec. 7, according to the sheriff’s office news release.
Charles Pressley Jr. had a gun when he got into the woman’s car outside of the ABC liquor store, and Brian Pressley used a car to block in the woman, the sheriff’s office reported in the news release.
The woman fought off attempts by Charles Pressley Jr. to steal her purse and to force her to drive, and the brothers gave up and left without taking anything from her, according to the news release.
The sheriff’s office reported Brian Pressley was charged with kidnapping, criminal conspiracy, attempted robbery, conspiracy to commit kidnapping and possession of a weapon during a violent crime, according to the news release. The 27-year-old Pelzer resident was released on a $65,000 bond, the sheriff’s office said in the release.
Charles Pressley Jr. was charged with carjacking, kidnapping, criminal conspiracy, attempted robbery, conspiracy to commit kidnapping and possession of a weapon during a violent crime, according to records at the Anderson County Detention Center, where he remains behind bars on other charges.
Flood told The State there is the hope that the facial recognition software will be used to solve more than current criminal investigations.
“The software potentially allows us to identify people from cold cases,” Flood said.
