More live facial recognition (LFR) vans will be rolled out across seven police forces in England to locate suspects for crimes including sexual offences, violent assaults and homicides, the Home Office has announced.
The forces will get access to 10 new vans equipped with cameras, which scan the faces of people walking past and check them against a list of wanted people.
The government says the technology has been used in London to make 580 arrests in 12 months, including 52 registered sex offenders who breached their conditions.
However, campaign group Big Brother Watch said the “significant expansion of the surveillance state” was “alarming”.
Live facial recognition was first used in England and Wales in 2017 during the Uefa Champions League final football match in Cardiff.
Since then its use has largely been confined to South Wales, London and Essex including at a Beyoncé concert to scan for paedophiles and terrorists.
The government is now funding 10 vans equipped with LFR to be shared between seven forces, approximately doubling the number of vehicles.
The seven forces are Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Bedfordshire, Surrey, Sussex, Thames Valley and Hampshire.
The technology identifies people by taking measurements of facial features including the distance between the eyes and the length of the jawline and then comparing the data to to an existing watchlist.
Each van will be staffed with a trained officer who checks the matches identified by the technology.
Simultaneously, the government is holding a consultation on what safeguards are needed to “ensure transparency and public confidence”, ahead of drawing up a new legal framework.
Big Brother Watch is bringing a legal challenge against the Met Police’s use of the technology, alongside Shaun Thompson, who was wrongly identified by an LFR camera.
Rebecca Vincent, interim director of Big Brother Watch, said: “Police have interpreted the absence of any legislative basis authorising the use of this intrusive technology as carte blanche to continue to roll it out unfettered, despite the fact that a crucial judicial review on the matter is pending.
“The Home Office must scrap its plans to roll out further live facial recognition capacity until robust legislative safeguards are established.”
Labour peer Baroness Chakrabarti told the BBC the technology was “incredibly intrusive” and “some would say this is yet another move towards a total surveillance society”.
The former director of human rights campaign group Liberty raised concerns over privacy, freedom of assembly and the potential for false matches.
Baroness Chakrabarti welcomed a consultation over legislation to govern the use of the technology but said so far it had been deployed “completely outside the law”, with police making up their own rules and marking their own homework.
Home Office Minister Dame Diana Johnson rejected claims of a surveillance state, saying signposting would make it clear to the public when the technology was being used and information would only be kept for the period of deployment.
She told the BBC facial recognition was “a powerful tool for policing” and it would only be used in “a very measured, proportionate way” to find individuals suspected of serious offences.
However, the technology has been used previously to target ticket touts in Wales.
Dame Diana said she did not know if facial recognition had been used for ticket touts.
She added that “a conversation needs to be had” about how the technology is used and the government was consulting on this.
The government says officers using the LFR vans will need to follow the College of Policing’s guidance on the technology and the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice.
It also says independent testing of the facial recognition algorithm by the National Physical Laboratory found that “the algorithm is accurate and there is no bias for ethnicity, age or gender at the settings used by the police”.
Ryan Wain, from the Tony Blair institute think tank, said using live facial recognition was “a no-brainer”.
“It means violent criminals on the police’s most wanted list can be picked out in a crowd and caught,” he said.
“Not on the list? Your face will be pixelated, and no data will be stored, end of.”
The Home Office has also announced that it has fulfilled a manifesto pledge to ensure there is a named, contactable officer in every neighbourhood in England and Wales.
It said people can search for an officer on the website of local police forces, who have signed up to a commitment to respond to queries within 72 hours.
The type of contact method provided will be up to individual forces.
