Police in the UK have used what appears to be an advanced facial recognition surveillance tool to identify and arrest several suspects in the wake of last summer’s unrest following the Southport stabbings, it has emerged.
The confirmation came from Northumbria Police, while reports say officers at the same time accessed the Police National Database to analyze more than 10,000 hours of CCTV footage.
That likely translates to a dataset containing images of scanned faces of a large number of people, ranging from thousands to possibly hundreds of thousands. And that is taking place despite the practice being “dangerously unregulated” in the UK, as Big Brother Watch is warning.
This rights group put the emphasis on the need to regulate the area in order to protect people’s privacy while carrying out police work. But the technology is clearly already in full use – even though still awaiting rules that would give legitimacy to law enforcement reaching for these kinds of tools.
Northumbria Police don’t seem to be detecting any problem regarding the situation, with a spokesperson revealing that they essentially hope the public would be satisfied to see even only potential suspects identified – regardless of the method.
“We would hope the overwhelming majority of people would want and expect us to use every tactic at our disposal to help identify potential suspects,” the spokesperson said, according to the BBC.
The same police force revealed that one of the “tactics” was to access the national database and look into over 10,000 hours of surveillance footage using a facial recognition tool they said was “the latest.”
Judging by a statement made by Detective Graeme Barr, this type of technology is capable of identifying people (i.e., their faces) – even if they wear masks.
“These offenders may think that because they wore masks or concealed their faces that we can’t trace them, but they would be mistaken,” Barr is quoted.
But such mass-scale and invasive new surveillance techniques must go hand in hand with new rules that prevent their abuse, privacy advocates are insisting.
Right now, as Big Brother Watch noted, it isn’t even known how many millions of people in the UK have photos of their faces in the police database.
“This is nothing short of Orwellian and demonstrates that regulation of these practices is badly needed in order to protect our right to privacy,” the group said, reacting to Northumbria Police disclosing their practices, specifically around the summer riots.
