The Metropolitan (London) Police have announced they are switching from using CCTV cameras attached to police vans (therefore conspicuous), to installing a permanent live facial recognition (LFR) network in Croydon, south London – specifically in North End and London Road.
With this job set to be complete in June or July, the cameras will go on building or street posts, capturing images of faces of everyone walking past them, as the police search for suspected criminals.
These images are compared to those in existing databases.
The London police promise that this type of personal data will not be retained if there is no match, and that the cameras will be operational when “officers are deployed on the ground ready to respond to alerts.”
And they assert that the technology they are now using produces fewer errors stemming from racial bias, compared to other types of facial recognition.
The Croydon deployment appears to be a test for the eventual city-wide installment of permanent LFR cameras, which the police say is necessary to better fight crime.
The development has been slammed by privacy campaigners, but welcomed by the likes of Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp, a Conservative, who not only dismissed those concerns, saying there are no legitimate reasons for them but went as far as to suggest that people critical of LFR “don’t want criminals to be arrested.”
Former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner Professor Fraser Sampson is one of those who have warned about the technology’s shortcomings but also the nature of the way police operate, mentioning in an article earlier this month that people are “finding themselves on a (facial recognition) ‘watchlist’ without having a police record.”
That suddenly makes the automatic deletion of faces of those not on a watchlist much less reassuring.
“There are people in England and Wales – several million by recent estimates – who were once arrested but were never proceeded with – some have found their way onto live FRT (facial recognition technology) watchlists,” Sampson writes.
Civil liberties group Big Brother Watch continues to be a vocal critic of LFR deployments, referring to the news from the Metropolitan Police as proof of a “steady slide into a dystopian nightmare” that is happening without proper oversight or legislative safeguards.
Big Brother Watch Interim Director Rebecca Vincent also remarked that a recent “failed” trial in Cardiff during a sporting event resulted in the police scanning “more than 160,000 faces” – but in “zero arrests.”
