After two men brutally assaulted a security guard on a desolate train platform on the outskirts of St. Louis, county transit police detective Matthew Shute struggled to identify the culprits. He studied grainy surveillance videos, canvassed homeless shelters and repeatedly called the victim of the attack, who said he remembered almost nothing because of a brain injury from the beating.
Months later, they tried one more option.
Shute uploaded a still image from the blurry video of the incident to a facial recognition program, which uses artificial intelligence to scour the mug shots of hundreds of thousands of people arrested in the St. Louis area. Despite the poor quality of the image, the software spat out the names and photos of several people deemed to resemble one of the attackers, whose face was hooded by a winter coat and partially obscured by a surgical mask
