POLICE SPY CAMERAS: WHAT THEY GET RIGHT – AND WRONG
SOUTH Wales Police was one of the first forces in the UK to roll out automated facial recognition (AFR) software when it first used it at the Champions League finals in Cardiff in May 2017.
But now the first independent evaluation of AFR says that if the use of it is expanded, it is important users are aware it “is not 100% reliable and can get things wrong”.
AFR should also be renamed “assisted facial recognition” because the software helps human operators make identifications rather than doing it alone, researchers from Cardiff University add.
Surveillance cameras scan the faces of people passing which create unique biometric maps of their faces. These maps are then compared with and matched with other facial images already on police databases.
The technology used by South Wales Police works in two modes: Locate and Identify.
Locate is the live, real-time application that scans faces within CCTV feeds in an area. Identify takes still images of unidentified persons (usually captured via CCTV or mobile phone camera) and compares these against the police custody database.
At the Uefa Champions League final, the force had to defend its use of AFR when it emerged that the system wrongly identified more than 2,000 people as potential criminals.
The technology provided hundreds of “false positives”, wrongly marking out innocent people as possible troublemakers when an estimated 170,000 people descended on the city for the showpiece match between Real Madrid and Juventus.
The force blamed the high number of false positives on the “poor quality of images” on the watch list supplied by Uefa, Interpol and other partner agencies as well as the fact it was the first major use of the technology.
Academics at Cardiff University have now evaluated the South Wales Police AFR programme, looking at how it worked at the final and other events, including the Anthony Joshua fight.
Cardiff’s University’s Police Science Institute also looked at how officers use AFR on the streets and in ongoing criminal investigations.
At the autumn rugby internationals in Cardiff in 2017, it found 91 matches, but only 13 were correct (14%) and there were four arrests.
At the Kasabian concert in Cardiff in 2017, AFR found seven matches, of which three were accurate (43%) and there was one arrest.
At last year’s Six Nations, 48 matches were made, 22 (46%) were accurate and there were five arrests.
At the Anthony Johsua fight in Cardiff this year AFR found 60 matches, of which five were accurate (9%) and there were two arrests. At the Elvis Festival in Porthcawl, AFR found 18 matches, of which 11 (6%) were accurate and there was one arrest.
Between July 2017 and July 2018 the accuracy of the technology improved and police got better at using it. By the end the Locate system was able to correctly identify a person of interest around 76% of the time.
Responding to Cardiff University’s report, Deputy Chief Constable Richard Lewis said: “The report provides a balanced perspective of our use of the technology and hopefully it will help to demystify some of the misunderstandings and misinformation that have proliferated across the press.
“South Wales Police remains committed to the continuous use of the technology in a proportionate and lawful way to protect the public, whilst also remaining open and transparent about how and when we use it.”