A Reno cop handcuffed a truck driver for 11 hours based on a casino's facial recognition software – and admitted under oath it never should have happened.
The lawsuit now says that cop wasn't a rogue officer doing something wrong.
He was doing exactly what the Reno Police Department trained him to do.
Reno Police Used Facial Recognition to Make Thousands of Arrests With No Written Policy
Jason Killinger walked into the Peppermill Casino in September 2023 carrying three forms of identification – a Real ID, a UPS pay stub, and his vehicle registration.
The casino's facial recognition system flagged him as a "100 percent match" for a man who'd been banned months earlier for sleeping on the premises.
Officer Richard Jager showed up, ignored the ID, and put Killinger in handcuffs.
Killinger spent four of those 11 hours in custody handcuffed tight enough to injure his shoulder.
He told Jager he had more proof of who he was out in his vehicle.
Jager's arrest report omitted all of it – and instead recorded that Killinger had presented conflicting identification, a claim the body camera footage directly contradicts.
A fingerprint check at Washoe County jail confirmed what every document in Killinger's pocket already said: wrong man.
After the Fingerprints Proved He Was Innocent Reno Kept the Case Open
City prosecutors filed a criminal complaint under the name "John Doe" and a Reno municipal judge found probable cause for trespass – even after the jail's own fingerprint records had already proven Killinger's identity.
The city attorney kept the case open and referred it to an RPD fraud detective.
That detective sided with Killinger and confirmed the Peppermill made an error.
A Reno sergeant responded by telling Jager there was probable cause to charge Killinger with identity theft anyway.
Jager declined.
The city was still trying to manufacture a crime against an innocent man they'd held for nearly half a day.
The Reno Police Department Had No Facial Recognition Policy and Still Does Not
In January 2026, Officer Jager sat for a deposition.
Under oath, he testified that the arrest "never should have happened" – and that he only learned facial recognition results can't establish probable cause after Killinger sued.
The Reno Police Department had no written policy on facial recognition at the time of the arrest.
As of April 2, 2026, they still don't.
The amended complaint, filed this month in US District Court with Federal Judge Miranda Du presiding, alleges Jager's arrest of Killinger was "not a sporadic incident involving the wrongful actions of a rogue employee, but the result of a widespread custom and practice involving hundreds of municipal employees making thousands of arrests in the same manner over a period of years."
Thousands of arrests.
The Department of Justice published guidance in 2017 explicitly stating that facial recognition results are "advisory in nature" and "do not establish probable cause."
Reno PD either never read it or didn't care.
Court filings show that RPD officers were so comfortable with the Peppermill's system that they would sometimes request the casino's help identifying suspects from other cases – outsourcing police work to casino surveillance software with no written oversight whatsoever.
The City Knew He Was Innocent and Kept Coming
The Peppermill Casino already settled its lawsuit with Killinger quietly and moved on.
City Attorney Jill Drake did not.
Drake sent the case to an RPD fraud detective – the city's last play to find something, anything, that could justify what happened.
That detective found nothing because there was nothing.
She wrote in an email that Killinger was an innocent person, that there was no identity theft, and that the Peppermill had simply screwed up.
A Reno sergeant responded by telling Officer Jager there was probable cause to charge Killinger with identity theft anyway.
Jager – the same officer who'd already arrested the wrong man and fabricated his report – declined.
The city's own arresting officer had more decency than its attorney.
Reno is now defending in federal court a system that, by the lawsuit's account, put thousands of people in handcuffs the same way it put Killinger in handcuffs – no corroboration, no verification, no policy requiring either.
The government took an innocent working man with a Real ID and a clean record, locked him up, injured him, lied about his documentation in official reports, and then spent months trying to invent a crime he didn't commit to cover their tracks.
They failed.
He's still suing.
And Jill Drake is still on the city's payroll.
Sources:
- "Reno Police Made Thousands of Unlawful Arrests Using Face ID, Suit Says," Reno Gazette Journal via AOL News, April 8, 2026.
- "Reno Cop Concedes Peppermill Facial Recognition Arrest was Wrongful," Casino.org, January 28, 2026.
- "Lawsuit Alleges Systemic Misuse of Facial Recognition by Reno Police," Biometric Update, April 9, 2026.
- "Man Sues City of Reno Over Use of Facial Recognition," KOLO-TV (Fox5 Vegas), April 8, 2026.
- "Reno Police Officer Admits Error in Arresting Individual Over False Facial Recognition at Peppermill Casino," This Is Reno, January 28, 2026.
- "Facial Recognition in Policing Is Getting State-by-State Guardrails," Stateline, February 4, 2025.
- "Arrested by AI: Police Ignore Standards After Facial Recognition Matches," The Washington Post, January 13, 2025.
