The issue of face recognition algorithms performing worse on dark faces is a major problem. But the other side of it is: would police be more hesitant to act on such fuzzy evidence if the top match appeared to be a middle-class Caucasian (i.e. someone who is more likely to take legal recourse)?
Essentially, an employee of the facial recognition provider forwarded an "investigative lead" for the match they generated (which does have a score associated with it on the provider's side, but it's not clear if the score is clearly communicated to detectives as well), and the detectives then put the photo of this man into a "6 pack" photo line-up, from which a store employee then identified that man as being the suspect.
Everyone involved will probably point fingers at each other, because the provider for example put large heading on their communication that, "this is not probable cause for an arrest, this is only an investigative lead, etc.", while the detectives will say well we got a hit from a line-up, blame the witness, and the witness would probably say well the detectives showed me a line-up and he seemed like the right guy (or maybe as is often the case with line-ups, the detectives can exert a huge amount of bias/influence over witnesses).
EDIT: Just to be clear, none of this is to say that the process worked well or that I condone this. I think the data, the technology, the processes, and the level of understanding on the side of the police are all insufficient, and I do not support how this played out, but I think it is easy enough to provide at least some pseudo-justification at each step along the way.
How did the people in the 6 pack photo line-up match up against the facial recognition? Were they likely matches?