Want to balance the Met's books, commissioner? Ditch facial recognition

11 December 2024, 08:40

It seems Met Commissioner Mark Rowley is in the market for ideas to balance the books, after warning of the 'eye-watering' cuts needed to keep the Met afloat.

Here’s one idea he can have for free: instead of cutting officer numbers or stopping them from responding to call-outs, scrap the Met’s controversial, expensive and Orwellian reliance on facial recognition surveillance.

Since 2016, the Met have been ramping up their use of live facial recognition technology. The tech involves police CCTV cameras scanning the faces of every passer-by and using an algorithm to look for people who have been placed on a watchlist.

Given your face-print is biometric data, it is the AI-powered equivalent of officers stopping everyone they see and scanning their fingerprints. With facial recognition surveillance, London’s streets become a permanent police line-up, where we are all suspects until proven innocent.

Live facial recognition has been deployed at protests, football matches, shopping centres, Notting Hill Carnival and even at a Remembrance Sunday event. But no law has ever been passed to oversee its use. Instead, the Met and other forces are writing their own rules.

Privacy intrusions aside, there are serious questions to be asked about whether this is a good use of taxpayers’ money. Since its launch, almost 1.5 million faces have been scanned by the Met. Just 40% of flags from the technology have led to an arrest.

Deployments often involve about a dozen officers, meaning tens of thousands of policing hours have been spent hoping criminals will walk past the camera. With an apparent £450m black hole to fill, the Met should be putting their resources into proper policing, not shiny distractions.

Many people flagged by facial recognition technology are entirely innocent. Londoner and anti-knife crime volunteer Shaun Thompson is one such individual. He was stopped, surrounded and held by officers for nearly half an hour after the police algorithm wrongly flagged him as a wanted criminal. The irony is all too apparent.

While groups of police officers stand around CCTV vans, waiting for their phones to ping, someone actually working to steer young people away from crime is treated like a criminal off the back of a dodgy algorithm. Shaun is now bringing legal action against the Met, adding to the spiralling cost of facial recognition for London’s police force.

The UK increasingly stands alone in its free-for-all approach to live facial recognition. The EU has just passed legislation which de facto bans police use of the technology, except in extremely limited cases. Even the Chinese government, hardly known for its privacy-respecting credentials, is clamping down on facial recognition technology after public backlash.

If the Met Commissioner is serious about rebuilding trust and using the Met’s resources wisely, he should get the basics right first before continuing to invest in this failed facial recognition experiment.

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Madeleine Stone is the Senior Advocacy Officer at Big Brother Watch.

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