Live facial recognition cameras may become 'commonplace' as police use soars

Summary

Police believe live facial recognition cameras may become “commonplace” in England and Wales, according to internal documents, with the number of faces scanned having doubled to nearly 5m in the last year.A joint investigation by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates highlights the speed at which the technology is becoming a staple of British policing.Major funding is being allocated and hardware bought, while the British state is also looking to enable police forces to more easily access the full spread of its image stores, including passport and immigration databases, for retrospective facial recognition searches.Live facial recognition involves the matching of faces caught on surveillance camera footage against a police watchlist in real time, in what campaigners liken to the continual finger printing of members of the public as they go about their daily lives.Retrospective facial recognition software is used by the police to match images on databases with those caught on CCTV and other systems.According to one funding document drawn up by South Wales police as part of a proposal to put the West End of London or Cardiff rail station under live facial recognition cameras and released by the Metropolitan police under the Freedom of Information Act, it is believed “the use of this technology could become commonplace in our city centres and transport hubs around England and Wales”.The first fixed live facial recognition cameras will be fitted for a trial in Croydon, south London, later this summer.The expansion comes despite facial recognition failing to be referenced in any act of parliament.Campaigners claim the police have been allowed to “self regulate” their use of the technology. Officers have in the past used a setting that was subsequently shown to disproportionately misidentify black people.After a court of appeal judgment in 2020, which found that South Wales police’s use of live facial recognition cameras had been unlawful, the College of Policing provided...