The Minister for Crime, Policing and the Fire Service ():...Since the ICO report
was published, we have had the judgment in a case brought against
South Wales police’s deployment of this technology, in which the
High Court found there is an appropriate legal basis for the
operation of facial recognition. However, I understand that there
may be an appeal, and there is a suspended judicial review into the
Met’s operation, which may be restarted, so if Members do not mind,
I will limit what I say about that.
As for disproportionality, there is no evidence of it at the
moment; the Met has not found disproportionality in its data in
the trials it has run, and certainly a Cardiff University review
of the South Wales Police deployment could not find any evidence
of it at all. The hon. Lady is, however, right to say that in a
country that prides itself in being an open and liberal society,
we need to take care with people’s impressions of how technology
may impinge upon that. As she will know, live facial recognition
has an awful lot of democratic institutions looking at it, not
only this House: the London Assembly has a policing ethics panel;
we have the Surveillance Camera Commissioner and the Information
Commissioner; and there is a facial recognition and biometrics
board at the National Police Chiefs’ Council, which brings people
together to look at these issues. There is lots of examination to
make sure that it is used appropriately, and I am pleased to say
that the Met will be operating it on a very transparent basis. As
I understand it, the Met will be publishing information about
which data was gathered and the success rate, and other
information that will allow the public to have confidence that
where the technology is deployed to identify wanted criminals it
is having the effect intended...
...As for unreliability, as technology is rolled out it obviously
becomes more and more effective and reliable—[Interruption.]
Well, I am the lucky owner of a telephone that allows me to make
banking payments on the basis of recognising my face. That
technology was not available in the last iteration of the
phone—it is an iPhone—which used my thumb instead. So there are
developments in technology. South Wales Police found in trials
that there was a 1:4,500 chance of triggering a false alert and
more than an 80% chance of a correct alert. It is worth bearing
in mind that even when the system does alert the police to a
possible identification, the final decision as to whether to
intervene with an individual is still taken by a human
being...
...The identification of individuals at large, by any
method, is a standard policing technique—whether it is done by a
human, a machine or, indeed, a member of the public—so increasing
its effectiveness is absolutely key. I am pleased that the
Scottish Government are mirroring many of the arrangements that
are being put in place in the rest of the United Kingdom to deal
with this technology because, as the hon. and learned Lady said,
it has enormous potential for us. We have seen the successful use
of the technology in pilots elsewhere. I was even told of an
occasion on which a police force—I forget which it was; it might
have been South Wales police—advertised the use of live facial
recognition at a rock concert where in the past there had been
significant problems with what they call “dipping”, which is in
effect the pickpocketing of wallets and phones. The mere
advertising of the technology resulted in there being no offences
committed...
...At the moment, this technology is being deployed only by
the South Wales Police and the Metropolitan
police. However, as I explained earlier, where the police do have
a wanted, serious and violent criminal who they believe may be
moving around in a particular location, they will deploy this
camera and a wanted list and, hopefully, identify that
individual. For areas that surround London, which often suffer
from the movement of violent criminals mainly to deal in drugs,
their identification as they move through particular areas and
therefore their apprehension will no doubt pay benefits to many
towns such as his and, indeed, such as the one in my constituency
that exist around the capital...
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