Thames Valley Police has scheduled a live facial recognition deployment on Slough High Street for July 23, continuing its repeated use of the technology in the town. The operation will be the fourth Slough deployment listed by the force in 2026 after events in February, April and May.
The force uses NEC NeoFace to compare facial images of people passing a camera against a watchlist. Its watchlists can include people wanted by police or courts and other persons of interest who meet the force’s inclusion criteria.
During the most recent Slough operation on May 18, police loaded a watchlist containing 4,420 entries. The system processed 22,819 faces and generated six alerts, with the published results recording two arrests and two other disposals.
An April 21 deployment used a watchlist of 4,406 people, generated three alerts from 7,729 faces and produced three arrests. On February 13, a smaller watchlist of 3,028 entries resulted in eight alerts and three arrests after 15,045 faces passed the cameras.
Those figures describe alerts and operational outcomes, not the number of unique people who were ultimately convicted or found to have committed an offense. They also show that watchlist size, crowd volume and alert counts vary substantially from one deployment to another.
Thames Valley Police publishes a standard operating procedure, data protection impact assessment, equality impact assessment and privacy notice for the program. The documents set rules for watchlist preparation, operator review and treatment of people whose faces do not produce a confirmed match.
The Slough operation comes as the UK government is expanding the national live facial recognition fleet with 40 additional vans. Ministers have also committed to consulting on the legal framework before wider rollout.
That framework remains under judicial scrutiny. The High Court is due to hear a challenge to police use of live facial recognition, with questions around watchlist discretion, proportionality and safeguards forming part of the wider debate.
Thames Valley Police says it will publish the July 23 deployment data within seven days, adding the figures to its table of watchlist sizes, alerts and operational outcomes.
Sources: Thames Valley Police, deployment results
–
By Ali Nassar-Smith
