A six-month live facial recognition technology (LFR) trial in London’s railway stations has been found to have led to one false match against a watchlist of suspects — and no arrests.
The trial, which cost more than £320,000 and took up almost 100 hours of police officers’ time, saw more than half a million faces scanned between February and July this year, according to a freedom of information document obtained by Liberty Investigates and The Guardian.
Trial extended despite no arrests
The British Transport Police (BTP) trial, which aims to help catch offenders and people breaching court orders, is being extended for a further four months, with deployments expanded to include London Underground stations. The one alert on a watchlist turned out to be an incorrect identification — although BTP have said that there have been three positive alerts of people who were confirmed to be complying with sexual harm prevention orders or other imposed court conditions since the extension.
Fraser Sampson, a non-executive director of Facewatch, a company that operates facial recognition systems in shops, added: “We know the technology works, but using it in supermarkets to deter shoplifters and prevent attacks on staff is very different from deploying it to catch people on a public transport network.
“Success in a shop means no such people coming in. Success for the police trying to catch people means people being caught. In that respect the trial doesn’t appear to have been very fruitful.
“Everything depends on the police watchlists; if you’re not on a watchlist, the live FRT cameras do not ‘see’ you and they don’t retain your image in the same way as CCTV cameras.”
Rollout and criticism
Transport for London (TfL) said that LFR technology “will target and identify people on police watchlists at key stations chosen for maximum impact” and would “specifically tackle violence against women and girls, whose travel behaviours are shaped by experiences of sexual harassment and sexual offences”.
More than half of police forces in England and Wales have now deployed LFR on British streets, and earlier this year the Met and London mayor’s office announced that fixed LFR cameras would be installed in the capital’s West End. London mayor Sadiq Khan has confirmed the technology will be used on the newly pedestrianised Oxford Street.
A report from parliament’s joint committee on human rights, which called on the government to address the threat of artificial intelligence to human rights, said that the rollout of LFR technology was a “particularly clear example of risk”.
Labour MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill Bell Ribeiro-Addy said: “Live facial recognition technologies are a serious invasion of our privacy.
“The government should be suspending their rollout until there are stronger safeguards in place, including a proper legal framework.”
A BTP spokesperson said that the LFR pilot’s aim was “to understand how the technology could most effectively support the identification of wanted offenders and individuals who may pose a risk to passengers and staff”.
They added: “Officers have made a number of associated arrests, including for assault, theft, possession of an offensive weapon, breach of a criminal behaviour order and public order offences, as well as locating individuals wanted by the courts and other police forces. As these arrests did not result directly from an LFR alert, they are not included within LFR performance data. Throughout the pilot, we have continued to refine how the capability is deployed within the railway environment.”
