Facial recognition to be added to police officers’ body-worn cameras
Facial recognition is to be deployed in police officers’ body-worn video cameras as part of Government plans to embed the technology across forces nationally.
Policing minister Chris Philp is said to want to extend the technology across forces in England and Wales and extend its deployment from solely CCTV to body worn devices, drones and ANPR number-plate cameras.
Only a handful of forces including South Wales and the Metropolitan police have so far used facial recognition cameras which allow officers to identify potential suspects or missing people and cross reference their image with a database of photographs.
The technology has, however, faced a backlash with courts actions that it represents a breach of privacy and can be inaccurate and biased, particularly against darker-skinned people.
The move by Mr Philp has been revealed in a report, co-authored by professors Pete Fussey, of Essex University, and William Webster, of Stirling University, on plans to abolish the role of a separate biometrics and surveillance commissioner by merging it with other watchdogs.
It comes as the Metropolitan Police is ramping up its use of facial recognition with its deployment during the coronation of King Charles III.
Last month, the Met announced that it had conducted a review into the technology’s effectiveness and found “no statistically significant bias in relation to race and gender, and the chance of a false match is just 1 in 6,000 people who pass the camera”.
In their report, the academics said: “This issue is made more pressing given the Policing Minister expressed his desire to embed facial recognition technology in policing and is considering what more the government can do to support the police on this.
“Such embedding is extremely likely to include exploring integration of this technology with police body worn video.”
Professor Fraser Sampson, the biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner, said the technology could play an important role in policing to help find missing vulnerable people, prevent serious offences by identifying criminals and protect national security by detecting terrorist suspects.
“But there needs to be more discussion with the public about what the safeguards are, where you go to find out more about how it is operated and separate the myths from the fact,” said Professor Sampson.
He said there had been a “regulatory vacuum” over facial recognition in that its wider expansion had never been put before Parliament. He said there needed to be “thoughtful and careful” policy discussion before it was widely deployed.
Although his research found evidence that police had used Chinese CCTV, no police force was using Chinese body worn cameras, which have been deployed with facial recognition technology by the Chinese state to identify Uyghurs and punish them if they are in the wrong areas.
The Home Office said: “The Government is committed to empower the police to use new technologies like facial recognition in a fair and proportionate way. Facial recognition plays a crucial role in helping the police tackle serious offences including murder, knife crime, rape, child sexual exploitation and terrorism.”
Source: (The Telegraph)