He wasn’t a natural born killer — just an alleged beer thief.
A creative NYPD detective used an image of Woody Harrelson to track down a look-alike suspect in the department’s facial-recognition system when footage of the actual person of interest didn’t turn up any matches.
The cop was hunting a perp caught on camera stealing beer from a Manhattan CVS on April 28, 2017, according to the report released Thursday by the Georgetown University Law Center.
But when pixelated footage provided no matches, the cop plugged in a still of the man’s celebrity doppelgänger from the 2012 movie “The Hunger Games” — whose character shares the same long locks as the suspected brew bandit.
An NYPD presentation on the case obtained by the report’s author shows Harrelson’s mug turned up a list of at least 11 male and female hits — including a man with a very similar hairline and protruding Adam’s apple, plus a record of similar crimes in the same Midtown precinct.
The match was distributed to other cops, who eventually made an arrest for petit larceny, the report says.
The NYPD refused to provide any more information on the arrest, but law-enforcement sources said the case is now sealed.
In another case, the department used an image of former New York Knick J.R. Smith while scouring for a man wanted for assault in Brooklyn, the report says.
The photo of Smith, who last played for the Cleveland Cavaliers, also spat out a potential match.
The Georgetown report, titled “Garbage In, Garbage Out: Face Recognition on Flawed Data,” is scathing of the practice.
“The stakes are too high in criminal investigations to rely on unreliable — or wrong — inputs,” writes report author Clare Garvie.
“It is one thing for a company to build a face recognition system designed to help individuals find their celebrity doppelgänger . . . 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.”
She adds that there are currently no rules about what images cops can submit to facial-recognition systems to produce fresh investigative leads.
The report claimed that in one case, NYPD cops made an arrest after texting a witness a “possible match” face-recognition photo, asking: “Is this the guy…?”
The NYPD insisted that it only uses facial recognition as one tool in its crime-fighting arsenal.
“Facial recognition is merely a lead; it is not a positive identification and it is not probable cause to arrest,” Sgt. Jessica McRorie said in a statement.
“No one has ever been arrested on the basis of a facial-recognition match alone. As with any lead, further investigation is always needed to develop probable cause to arrest.”
The NYPD has also been engaged in a legal battle to claw back some of the documents used in Georgetown’s research, claiming some of the documents — obtained through a public-records lawsuit — were released inadvertently.
A Manhattan judge last month ordered Garvie to return the documents and prevented her from referencing them, according to the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Additional reporting by Larry Celona