Live facial recognition cameras may become ‘commonplace’ as police use soars

Exclusive: The Guardian and Liberty Investigates find police in England and Wales believe expansion is likely after 4.7m faces scanned in 2024Valuable tool or cause for alarm? Facial ID quietly becoming part of police’s arsenalPolice believe live facial recognition cameras may become “commonplace” in England and Wales, according to internal documents, with the number of faces scanned having doubled to nearly 5m in the last year.A joint investigation by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates highlights the speed at which the technology is becoming a staple of British policing.Police forces scanned nearly 4.7m faces with live facial recognition cameras last year – more than twice as many as in 2023. Live facial recognition vans were deployed at least 256 times in 2024, according to official deployment records, up from 63 the year before.A roving unit of 10 live facial recognition vans that can be sent anywhere in the country will be made available within days – increasing national capacity. Eight police forces have deployed the technology. The Met has four vans.Police forces have considered fixed infrastructure creating a “zone of safety” by covering the West End of London with a network of live facial recognition cameras. Met officials said this remained a possibility.Forces almost doubled the number of retrospective facial recognition searches made last year using the police national database (PND) from 138,720 in 2023 to 252,798. The PND contains custody mug shots, millions of which have been found to be stored unlawfully of people who have never been charged with or convicted of an offence.More than 1,000 facial recognition searches using the UK passport database were carried out in the last two years, and officers are increasingly searching for matches on the Home Office immigration database, with requests up last year, to 110. Officials have concluded that using the passport database for facial recognition is “not high risk” and “is not controversial”, according to internal documents.The Home Office is now working with the police to establish a new national facial recognition system, known as strategic facial matcher. The platform will be capable of searching a range of databases including custody images and immigration records. Continue reading...