It is indeed the way traditional policing works. The average police officer things facial recognition is the visual equivalent of Google and since he/she can similarly rely on search results - they either have no idea about false positive biases based on race or worse, probably are too lazy to dig deeper.
Though the suffering of the victims of such wrong matches is real, one consolation is that more of such cases will hopefully bring about the much needed scepticism in the results so that some old-fashioned validation/investigation is done.