US police forensics is absurd fakery once again. I'm going to be optimistic and just hope this is ignorance and not knowing maliciousness. If so it's a trend that's not going to go away without making police take lifetime training, testing, and certification like nurses and other professionals have to do. They need to stay up to date on both the law and the technologies used in their careers.
This seems very unlikely to work, but the principle of using phenotypical information from DNA feels defensible. I guess that’s the main point of the service whose terms were violated by using facial recognition?
I can't imagine that this kind of evidence would be admissible in court, right? It might be useful to give you some leads but I would hope that no one is convicted on this tech alone.