UK Parliament Holds Historic First Debate on Police Use of Live Facial Recognition

The UK Parliament conducted its first-ever debate on live facial recognition (LFR) technology in Westminster Hall this week, marking a significant milestone in the ongoing discussion of surveillance technology governance. The debate, initiated by Conservative MP John Whittingdale, examined the technology’s deployment by UK police forces and highlighted several critical aspects of its implementation, coming at a time of expanding use of LFR across British law enforcement.

Currently, the UK lacks dedicated legislation governing facial recognition technologies. Instead, authorities rely on common law and interpretations of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which predates LFR technology and contains no specific provisions for its use. This legislative gap has become increasingly significant as more police forces, including Essex Police, adopt the technology.

The UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has determined that the Metropolitan Police and South Wales Police can achieve equitable outcomes by setting face-match thresholds to 0.6. This finding is particularly noteworthy given South Wales Police’s previous legal challenges regarding their use of automatic facial recognition technology, which was ruled unlawful by the Court of Appeals before being revised.

Former Conservative Policing Minister Chris Philp reported that LFR implementation has led to approximately 200 arrests in Croydon for serious offenses, including grievous bodily harm, fraud, domestic burglary, and rape. Philp stated, “This technology is 4,500 times less likely to result in someone being inappropriately stopped than a regular stop and search.” These results come as part of a broader expansion of biometric technology use by UK law enforcement, including the Metropolitan Police’s deployment of biometric fingerprint scanners.

However, Labour MP Dawn Butler raised concerns about the potential for misidentification, noting that “There’s no such thing as no misrepresentations, or people who are not wrongly identified, and it’s also very easy for a police service to lower that number because we have no judicial oversight of it.”

The civil rights organization Liberty, which has consistently advocated against biometric surveillance, called for a complete ban on the technology, stating that “Creating law to govern police and private company use…will not solve the human rights concerns or the tech’s inbuilt discrimination.”

Conservative MP David Davis emphasized the necessity for judicial oversight and explicit guidelines rather than relying on non-statutory guidelines or police discretion. The debate also addressed the potential integration of LFR with the UK’s existing network of six million CCTV cameras and its implications for public trust in law enforcement, a concern that has grown as facial recognition deployment has expanded across British cities.

Source: Computer Weekly

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November 14, 2024 – by Cass Kennedy