Exactly what I thought when I've read about this. It's not like humans are great at matching faces either. In fact machines have been better at facial recognition for over a decade now. I bet there are hundreds of people (of all races) in prison right now who are there simply because they were mis-identified by a human. Human memory, even in the absence of bias and prejudice, is pretty fallible.
There is a notion of "mixture of experts" in machine learning. It's when you have two or more models that are not, by themselves, sufficiently good to make a robust prediction, but that make different kinds of mistakes, and you use the consensus estimate. The resulting estimate will be better than any model in isolation. The same should be done here - AI should be merely a signal, it is not a replacement for detective work, and what's described in the article is just bad policing. AI has very little to do with that.