London police are taking civilian surveillance to a whole new level
Critics say the technology is an invasion of privacy
LONDON — London’s police department said Friday that it would begin using facial recognition to spot criminal suspects with video cameras as they walk the streets, adopting a level of surveillance that is rare outside China.
The decision is a major development in the use of a technology that has set off a worldwide debate about the balance between security and privacy. Police departments contend that the software gives them a way to catch criminals who may otherwise avoid detection. Critics say the technology is an invasion of privacy, has spotty accuracy and is being introduced without adequate public discussion.
Britain has been at the forefront of the debate. In a country with a history of terrorist attacks, police surveillance has traditionally been more accepted than in other Western countries. Closed circuit television cameras line the streets.
The technology London will deploy goes beyond many of the facial recognition systems used elsewhere, which match a photo against a database to identify a person. The new tools use software that can immediately identify people on a police watch list as soon as they are filmed on a video camera.
The Metropolitan Police said in a statement that the technology would help quickly identify and apprehend suspects and help “tackle serious crime, including serious violence, gun and knife crime, child sexual exploitation and help protect the vulnerable.”
London has faced several terror attacks and seen an increase in crime in recent years. In November, police shot and killed a man wearing a fake bomb on London Bridge after two people were fatally stabbed. The police
called the attack a terror incident. In 2017, another stabbing attack left eight dead and dozens wounded. Knife crime in England and Wales rose to a record high in the first nine months of last year, according to government statistics.
“Every day, our police officers are briefed about suspects they should look out for,” Nick Ephgrave, assistant commissioner of the police department, said in the statement. Live facial recognition, he said, “improves the effectiveness of this tactic.”
“As a modern police force, I believe that we have a duty to use new technologies to keep people safe in London,” he added.
Facial recognition, already widespread in China, is gaining traction in Western countries. Many cities and police departments, like the New York City Police Department, use technology comparing photos and other static images against a database of mug shots. An investigation by The New York Times this month found that more than 600 law enforcement agencies are using a facial recognition system by the company Clearview AI.
Use of real-time facial recognition is less common.
NEC, a Japanese company that makes biometric and facial recognition services, sold London the technology now being adopted. Other buyers of its real-time facial recognition technology include Surat, a city of about 5 million people in India, and the country of Georgia, according to the company’s website.
The technology is also used every few weeks in Cardiff, the capital of Wales, often at big events like rugby matches or a concert for the heavy metal band Slipknot this past week. As of September, police in Wales say, the technology had helped in the arrests of 58 people who had been wanted.
Representatives at NEC did not respond to a request for comment.
According to researchers at Georgetown University, several U.S. cities have piloted the live facial recognition systems, often with mixed results. In Orlando, Florida, a pilot program that ended last year tried to match faces going past several cameras against individuals on a watch list. In Detroit, police purchased a face-identification system as part of a crime-prevention program. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported on the failures of a New York pilot program to spot people as they drove past bridges and tunnels.