Nottinghamshire Police Adds Mobile Live Facial Recognition Van

Nottinghamshire Police is preparing to deploy live facial recognition from a marked van, extending the technology to another police force in England and Wales.

The vehicle has a dual-camera system providing 360-degree coverage. Faces captured in the monitored area will be converted into biometric templates and checked against a watchlist created for the deployment. Police say the list will include people suspected of serious crimes and people they are trying to locate for safeguarding purposes, such as missing or vulnerable individuals.

An alert will prompt officers to engage with the person and assess whether further action is appropriate. Detective Superintendent Will Henley said the software will function as an intelligence tool and will not replace the officer’s decision. A candidate match therefore does not by itself establish identity or require an arrest.

The force says a facial scan will be erased within seconds when no watchlist match is identified. Its announcement did not name the technology supplier or disclose the matching threshold, independent test results, watchlist size limits or the date and location of the first deployment.

Those details are significant because the accuracy and intrusiveness of a live system depend on camera conditions, watchlist quality, matching settings and how officers review alerts. Publication of deployment notices and results can allow the public to assess how many faces were scanned, how many alerts were correct and what outcomes followed.

Nottinghamshire’s rollout comes as the UK government expands the national fleet with 40 additional vans. The program is intended to give more forces access to mobile systems for locating wanted suspects in busy public areas.

The expansion has proceeded while the national legal framework remains contested. Parliament held its first dedicated debate on police live facial recognition this year, with lawmakers raising questions about statutory authority, proportionality and oversight.

Current Home Office guidance describes live facial recognition as a process that compares people in a camera feed with a deployment-specific watchlist. Police forces are expected to complete legal and data-protection assessments, apply human oversight and use signs or other notices to tell people when a system is operating.

Nottinghamshire Police has not yet published operational results for the new van. The first deployments will provide an initial measure of how narrowly watchlists are constructed, how long the system operates and whether alerts lead to confirmed identifications.

Sources: Counter Terror Business, Nottinghamshire Police, UK Home Office

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By the ID Tech Editorial Team