More police forces to use facial recognition technology

Local TV

Surrey Police demonstrate the use of Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology as a new fleet of LFR vans are rolled out by seven UK police forces in an expanded pilot.

Transcript

00:00There will always be an operational rationale and case as to why we are deploying it. It will be

00:05authorised by a senior officer but we want to use it in the places where it's going to matter most.

00:11We know our crime and incidents are concentrated to certain areas

00:16and we'll be deploying it there to have maximum effect.

00:21The Metropolitan Police have been using live facial recognition technology for a while now.

00:29Civil liberties and anti-racism groups criticised the software for having a well-documented history

00:36of inaccurate outcomes and racial bias ahead of the Notting Hill Carnival this year.

00:44In response, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley acknowledged that the software

00:52was limited when it was used at the Carnival in 2016 and in 2017,

00:58but has made considerable progress since then and the force praised its effectiveness at the event

01:06this year. London along with neighbouring Surrey Police and Essex Police are now all using this

01:14technology but Home Office funding has also been provided for new facial recognition vans in Greater

01:22Manchester, West Yorkshire, Bedfordshire, Sussex, Thames Valley and Hampshire.

01:29A question a lot of us ask is how does it work? Well, police watch lists are uploaded to the van,

01:36include details and photos of wanted people and people subject to court orders such as sex offenders.

01:44If their faces are scanned by the van's cameras, it will alert the officer to the match

01:52and they can verify whether the comparison is correct and take action. The police say that in images of

02:00people walking past the van which do not set off an alert will be deleted in less than a second.

02:07We want it to be reassuring to the public and in the lead up to deploying we'll carefully keep any

02:15community impact under consideration and also when we are deploying the van while the engagement officers

02:22are waiting to respond to an alert it's a positive duty on them to just talk to the public those

02:27passing about the technology and reassure them about it.

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