London’s police test of live facial recognition (LFR) has ended with more than half a million faces scanned, but zero actual suspects or arrests attributable to the technology, The Guardian reported.
British Transport Police (BTP) cumulatively spent around £321,000 (about $425,000) and nearly 100 hours of officers’ time rolling out 18 deployments at railway stations from February to July of this year. The LFR trial resulted in just a single alert being set off, according to The Guardian, but it ended up being a case of mistaken identity.
BTP is planning on continuing the test for another four months, this time adding the busy London Underground. Transport for London (TfL), the municipal entity that runs most transit in the city, has lent its support to the extension and stated that LFR will “target and identify people on police watchlists at key stations chosen for maximum impact.” Specifically, TfL said they were on the lookout for sexual harassers and offenders targeting girls and women on the Underground, which the BBC reported last year is a huge problem.
A BTP spokesperson told the paper that during the test, police had located individuals sought by the courts, as well as made “associated arrests” for “assault, theft, possession of an offensive weapon, breach of a criminal behavior order, and public order offenses.” The spokesperson added those numbers don’t show in the data because “these arrests did not result directly from an LFR alert.”
So if LFR is proving handy to British police, it certainly isn’t by spotting ne’er-do-wells that they don’t already know are there.
One key limitation for LFR implementation appears to be how many people are around and what they’re doing. A former UK biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner who now works for retail LFR operator Facewatch, Fraser Sampson, told The Guardian that LFR works much differently in stores than in public because they only seek to bar specific troublemakers.
“Success in a shop means no such people coming in,” Sampson said. “Success for the police trying to catch people means people being caught. In that respect the trial doesn’t appear to have been very fruitful.”
“Everything depends on the police watchlists; if you’re not on a watchlist, the live FRT cameras do not ‘see’ you and they don’t retain your image in the same way as CCTV cameras,” Sampson added.
The UK is notoriously one of the most surveilled countries on the planet due to its tens of millions of CCTV cameras, and British civil rights groups have raised a furor about the LFR trials.
The U.S. isn’t much better, as federal law allows indiscriminate and widespread use of facial recognition. In just one example, this summer the Department of Homeland Security granted local police access to ICE Task Force Module, an app that allows them to scan any face through a federal database with 250 million entries.
