London Live Facial Recognition Trial Ends With One False Positive and No Arrests

More than half a million faces were scanned during 18 deployments at some of the capital’s busiest transport hubs, the documents show. The British Transport Police said the pilot was intended to help catch offenders and people breaching court orders. Equipment hire and police staffing for the deployments cost £320,786, and the trial produced only one alert on a watchlist, which turned out to be an incorrect identification, also known as a false positive.

Last month, BTP announced it was extending the trial for a further four months and expanding deployments to include London Underground stations. When Transport for London announced its support for the extension, it said 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.”

Fraser Sampson, former biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner for the UK, said police needed to show that use of the technology was proportionate. He said many variables needed to align, including the choice of location, times of day, the make-up of the watchlist and the likelihood of people being present. Sampson, now a non-executive director of Facewatch, which 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.”

He also said that everything depends on police watchlists, and that people not on a watchlist are not “seen” by live FRT cameras and do not have their images retained in the same way as CCTV cameras. He added that the technology processes special category personal data, so it must be used in a way that is appropriate, proportionate and necessary, and that police must show how deployments meet those criteria while oversight boards hold them to account, as the Information Commissioner’s Office has recently reported.

More than half of police forces in England and Wales have now deployed live facial recognition on British streets, according to an analysis by Liberty Investigates. The Metropolitan police and the London mayor’s office announced this summer that they planned to install fixed LFR cameras in the capital’s West End. Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has since confirmed it will be used on the newly pedestrianised Oxford Street. A recent report from parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights, which called on the government to introduce a law to address the threat of artificial intelligence to human rights, identified the rollout of live facial recognition technology as a “particularly clear example of risk.”

Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Labour MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill, 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 the LFR pilot was launched 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.” The spokesperson added that during the deployments officers 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 courts and other police forces. The spokesperson said these arrests did not result directly from an LFR alert and were therefore not included within LFR performance data. The spokesperson also said BTP had continued to refine how the capability is deployed, including deployment locations, operating procedures, equipment and watchlist construction, and that watchlist growth had been deliberate, controlled and aligned to BTP policy, beginning with a more limited watchlist while ensuring data quality, governance and safeguarding arrangements were robust.