Western Australia Police says its five-month live facial recognition trial scanned 1,380,882 faces and led to 122 arrests before it ended on Oct. 31. The force has withdrawn the camera vans from public deployment while it evaluates the trial.
The technology was used in 100 deployments across 43 regional and metropolitan locations. Alongside the arrests, alerts led officers to engage with 146 registered sex offenders and locate 10 people for welfare checks. Three operations at the Perth Royal Show scanned 223,749 faces, producing 15 alerts, three arrests and seven interactions with registered sex offenders.
A police spokesperson said the system generated nine incorrect alerts across the 1.38 million scans, which the force described as an error rate of 0.00065 percent. Commissioner Col Blanch said officers engaged with each person who was wrongly flagged. “No one was arrested. No one made a complaint,” he said at a media conference on Nov. 1, adding that the technology was “not perfect.”
The totals compare with a three-month update that reported 905,117 faces scanned across 77 deployments, with 209 alerts and eight incorrect alerts. The trial began on June 22 and used cameras on or near marked police vehicles to compare faces in designated public areas against an alert list drawn from police databases.
Police said images of people who were not on the alert list were pixelated in real time and deleted immediately without being stored. Blanch said the trial “focused on using modern technology responsibly to identify people who presented a risk, while allowing the vast majority of people to go about their day without any impact.”
Civil liberties groups disputed how the force framed its error rate. Bill Rowlings, chief executive of Civil Liberties Australia, said the true rate would be known only when the 122 people arrested had their cases decided in court. Sarah Schwartz, legal director at the Human Rights Law Centre, said every false match is “a real person who may be stopped, questioned or investigated because an algorithm got it wrong,” and questioned the use of surveillance vans at public demonstrations.
The force’s internal evaluation is examining how the technology performed and its community impact, including “reviewing the safeguards and whether all requirements were met.”
Sources: The Guardian, Government of Western Australia
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
