Porcha Woodruff sues Detroit after police arrested her 8-months pregnant

A Detroit woman said she was falsely arrested for carjacking while eight months pregnant due to faulty facial recognition technology, according to a new lawsuit.

Porcha Woodruff, a mother of three, said she thought cops were joking when they showed up to take her into custody in February on charges of robbery and carjacking, according to the lawsuit, filed Thursday in US District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan.

“Are you kidding, carjacking? Do you see that I am eight months pregnant,” Woodruff told one officer who told her she had a warrant for her arrest on Feb. 16, the lawsuit alleges.

“I was scared, that was the main thing,” Woodruff told The Post Sunday evening after realizing cops weren’t joking. “What is going on?”

“There was no sympathy, there was like ‘OK let’s pause,’” she added.

Woodruff later learned she was being “implicated as a suspect” from a photo lineup shown to the victim following an “unreliable facial recognition match,” according to the court documents.

Woodruff has filed a lawsuit against the city and Detective LaShauntia Oliver, who spearheaded the case.

The now-dismissed charges against her came less than a month after a male victim called 911 on Jan. 29 and said he was robbed at gunpoint of his cell phone and car.

The charges were later dropped due to insufficient evidence.

The victim told police he and a woman had sex at a liquor store after meeting her at a market the same day, the lawsuit states.

The pair stopped by a BP gas station and the woman spoke with people there. The victim and female then traveled to another location where the victim was robbed by another man, according to the suit.

The male suspect had spoken with the victim’s female companion at the gas station, the victim told police.

The cell phone was later returned to the gas station by the female suspect where footage was captured of her, the lawsuit says.  

Once the video was grabbed from the store, facial recognition was run that identified Woodruff as the woman in the video, the lawsuit states. The victim also picked Woodruff as the female he was with during the robbery, though he was shown a photo of her from 2015, the lawsuit alleges.

The 2015 photo was from an arrest tied to driving with an expired license, her legal team said.

Police had access to a current driver’s license photo, but didn’t show it to the victim, and Det. Oliver also failed to show the male suspect a photo of Woodruff after he was arrested, the lawsuit states.

When authorities came to arrest Woodruff, she was getting her two kids ready for school.

“(Woodruff) was forced to tell her two children, who stood there crying, to go upstairs and wake plaintiff’s fiancé to tell him that ‘Mommy is going to jail,’” the lawsuit says.

While detained for 11 hours, Woodruff was dealing with gestational diabetes from her pregnancy, the lawsuit states.

After she was released on $100,000 bail, she had to go to the hospital due to dehydration and dealing with contractions, according to the suit.

Detroit Police Chief James White told NBC News the allegations are “very concerning” and police were taking the matter “very seriously,” but couldn’t say more for now.

Attorney Ivan Land, who is representing Woodruff, said police should have done more investigating instead of relying on facial recognition identification.

“And if they were to just take a five-minute drive to her home, they would have saw her condition being eight months and they would have known that she was not the individual who committed the crimes of carjacking and robbery,” the attorney said.