A fresh expansion of UK crimefighters’ access to live facial recognition (LFR) technology is being described by officials as “an excellent opportunity for policing.” Privacy campaigners diagree.

The Home Office said today that more police forces across England will gain LFR capabilities thanks to ten new “cutting edge” vans being wheeled out, adding to those already in use by London’s Metropolitan Police and forces in South Wales.

Seven forces will gain access to LFR vans as part of the latest expansion. These are: Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Bedfordshire, Surrey and Sussex (jointly), and Thames Valley and Hampshire (jointly).

The UK government insists LFR vans, which are strongly opposed by privacy campaigners, are effective policing tools and are used only in targeted cases informed by firm intelligence.

In essence, they are not simply plonked into high-footfall areas and activated in the hope of catching someone on a wanted list somewhere.

Various privacy considerations are made with each LFR deployment in the UK, the cops say. These include notifying the public about when, where, and for how long LFR will be used in a given area, allowing them to exercise their right not to be captured by the technology.

However, the College of Policing’s guidance states that in cases of a critical threat or where there is insufficient time to alert the public, police may still deploy LFR without warning.

The government also insists the tech is independently tested at the National Physical Laboratory, which found the underlying algorithm to be accurate and free of age, gender, or ethnicity-related bias.

South Wales Police say they have not seen a false alert since August 2019, and claim LFR has never led to a wrongful arrest.

Existing deployments in London and South Wales have resulted in 580 arrests over the past 12 months, the Home Office said. It said the types of offenders it has helped capture include rapists, domestic abusers, violent criminals, and 52 registered sex offenders breaching their conditions.

The new vans will hit the streets in the coming weeks, and it will be up to each force to determine how they are deployed. Each will have to follow the College of Policing’s guidance and be monitored, with the findings feeding into a government consultation – also announced today – which will inform a new legal framework.

Lindsey Chiswick, who heads up all things LFR at the National Police Chief’s Council, said the technology supports effective policing and allows officers to locate suspects quickly and accurately.

“The increased access to Live Facial Recognition vehicles to forces that previously did not have the capability is an excellent opportunity for policing. Each Live Facial Recognition deployment will be targeted, intelligence-led, within a set geographical location and for a defined period of time, ensuring deployments are proportionate, lawful, and necessary.

“Live Facial Recognition has already been used in policing to great success, locating thousands of wanted offenders, or others breaching their bail conditions.

“I am confident that the increased use of this technology will continue to support the safety of communities across the country moving forward.”

‘A significant expansion of the surveillance state’

Silkie Carlo, head of privacy group Big Brother Watch (BBW) and a stout opposer of LFR, said the ten new vans amount to doubling the police’s LFR capability. She added that previous deployments have led to misidentifications.

The campaign group has an ongoing legal battle with the Met, which centers around Shaun Thompson, an anti-knife crime community worker at Street Fathers, who was wrongly stopped by LFR-assisted officers last year and questioned for almost half an hour.

In BBW’s response to today’s news, it described the new vans as a “frightening expansion of the technology,” and that it was “worrying for our democracy.”

“Live facial recognition turns every passerby into a walking barcode and treats us all as a nation of suspects,” said Rebecca Vincent, interim director at BBW.

“Police have interpreted the absence of any legislative basis authorizing the use of this intrusive technology as carte blanche to continue to roll it out unfettered, despite the fact that a crucial judicial review on the matter is pending.

“This move is not only worrying for our privacy rights, it is worrying for our democracy. The Home Office must scrap its plans to roll out further live facial recognition capacity until robust legislative safeguards are established.”

Secret databases

It is the second time in recent days that the UK’s approach to facial recognition has angered privacy advocates. 

BBW and Privacy International claimed last week that the UK government had made photos from its passport and immigration databases available to police facial recognition systems, allowing them to scan against these images regardless of whether the individuals are on a police watchlist.

UK police are typically only able to use LFR for specific investigations and can only scan crowds for faces on a police watchlist, which is populated by around 20 million images.

BBW and Privacy International claimed the images made available to facial recognition systems via the additional databases raised this number by around 150 million.

Freedom of Information requests made by the pro-privacy pair revealed a surge in police scans against these databases, with 31 forces involved.

They said the number of searches against the passport database had risen from two in 2020 to 417 by 2023, and regarding the immigration database, scans rose from 16 in 2023 to 102 the following year.

The Home Office countered by saying these databases are only called upon by officers using Retrospective Facial Recognition (RFR) systems, which are used when a crime has definitely been committed and police are looking for a specific culprit.

It added that these databases are not reached by LFR systems, and police must request its approval before scanning them. ®