Human rights concerns over police fingerprint devices
A RACIAL justice and human rights organisation has challenged West Yorkshire Police and the Home Office over the roll out of mobile fingerprint scanning devices “without any debate”.
JUST Yorkshire said it had deep concerns about the move to equip hundreds of police with a phone app and scanners which allow fingerprints to be checked against live criminal and immigration databases on the spot.
The Home Office had announced on Saturday that the new technology was tested successfully in West Yorkshire and 250 scanners would be distributed to frontline officers in the county over the coming weeks.
It said the Biometric Services Gateway system was also expected to be rolled out by 20 forces nationally by the end of the year.
Nadeem Murtuja, interim director of JUST Yorkshire, yesterday said: “I worry this scheme will deliberately target people that are non-white and those people that are perceived to be of European descent checking their status against criminal and immigration databases.”
He also questioned why West Yorkshire was selected for the trial and the county’s police and crime commissioner (PCC), Mark Burns-Williamson, had not talked to communities.
A spokesman for the PCC’s office said: “We recognise JUST Yorkshire’s input and will respond comprehensively to their questions in due course.”
He said they would also be closely monitoring use of the devices, which do not store details.
Chief Inspector Ian Williams, West Yorkshire’s Digital Policing Lead, said: “This fingerprint technology can only be used without consent where there is an offence committed and where a person’s identity is doubted.
“It absolutely does not allow for the random targeting of any individual group and there is no associated payments for officers in identifying a suspect.”
A Home Office spokesman added that police in England and Wales had used mobile fingerprint checks for more than a decade and the process was subject to “strict legal safeguards”.