The Metropolitan Police has begun rolling out facial recognition technology at Premier League games for the first time.
Supporters who are subject to football banning orders are being added to the watchlist, along with wanted criminals and other offenders.
Below, Policing Minister Chris Philp and Madeleine Stone from civil liberties group Big Brother Watch argue the pros and cons of the controversial tech.
Chris Philp is minister for crime, policing and fire
One of my top priorities as Policing Minister is to empower police officers with the technologies they need to keep us safe, and one of the tools that has been vital in tracking down criminals over the last few years is facial recognition.
This is the use of state-of-the-art technology to capture live footage of crowds and compares these images with a watch list of known offenders wanted by the police. These are offenders who often pose the greatest risk of harm to themselves or others.
When there is a match, an alert will go out to police officers nearby to track down the offender on the ground.
This will precisely and immediately pick a face out of a dense crowd, something which would be impossible for an officer to do, and it has proved to be an intelligence-led tool allowing the police to quickly and accurately identify wanted criminals.
At last month’s north London Derby, the police caught three wanted suspects.
At last year’s Coronation of King Charles, the Met Police did an incredible job at keep at keeping everyone safe, and thanks to this technology, they were also able to send a wanted sex offender back to jail that day.
This technology is also being used to identify unknown people caught on camera committing crimes and help put them behind bars.
Craig Walters was jailed for life in 2021 after attacking a woman he followed off a bus. He was arrested within 48 hours of the incident thanks to South Wales Police using facial recognition on recorded CCTV footage to identify him.
Images taken by a member of the public inside a Coventry nightclub where a murder had taken place were quickly matched to a known individual.
The victim’s blood was found on his clothing, he was charged and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Multiple burglars have been caught thanks to doorbells with cameras, the modern equivalent of a thief leaving a fingerprint.
This week I launched a joint action plan with police and retailers to tackle shoplifting, which will see the police using facial recognition to target prolific offenders.
The technology also frees up police time and resources, meaning more officers can be out on the beat, engaging with communities and carrying out complex investigations.
As with all developing technology, it is important to listen to concerns and make sure the right safety checks are in place.
The Met have been transparent and open in their approach and have had the technology they use independently tested so that they, and Londoners, can have confidence.
This includes putting up notices in areas where they will be using Live Facial Recognition.
And if the system does not make a match with the watchlist, the data is deleted immediately and automatically.
There have also been concerns about how accurate this technology is. These concerns are frankly out of date.
An independent study has found that it was 100% accurate when used on recorded images, and only 1 in 6000 false alerts when used on live images.
It also found no statistically significant differences in performance based on gender or ethnicity in the way the Met use it. In practice the Met have had no false alerts this year after scanning a quarter of a million faces.
Facial recognition technology will never replace the need for human judgement.
The Home Secretary and I are clear that we should be embracing the opportunities provided by technology such as facial recognition, and polling shows most of the public agree.
This will help us deliver smarter, more effective policing and, ultimately, make our streets safer here in the capital and throughout the country.
Madeleine Stone is senior advocacy officer at Big Brother Watch
Being forced to hand over our fingerprints to the police in order to watch a football match would never be considered acceptable. But for the first time, the Met have taken this approach to the faceprints of football supporters.
Everyone exiting Highbury and Islington station on their way to the North London Derby earlier this month had their face scanned, mapped and checked against a vast database, by a facial recognition van parked directly outside the station.
The decision to target football supporters for biometric identity checks treats them like potential criminals.
Live facial scanning turns public spaces into a police line-up, where members of the public are treated with suspicion and can be identified at will by police cameras.
Of 191 alerts on the system since 2016, only 41 have been correct, and a miniscule 31 have led to arrests. At a time when police are under huge pressure and turn up to 999 calls hours late, this is hardly an effective use of resources.
The inaccuracy is worse for those of us who aren’t white men - leading research consistently demonstrates that facial recognition systems are less accurate for women and people of colour.
This means black and Asian Londoners are more likely to be wrongly flagged as criminals and made to prove their innocence due to a dodgy algorithm. This is stop and search on steroids.
London’s police force is already struggling in the wake of the Casey Report, which found that the force is institutionally racist, to regain the trust of Londoners.
The decision to invest in a discriminatory technology is misguided at best, or, at worse, an indicator that it is still business as usual at the Met.
Live facial recognition is inefficient, intrusive and discriminatory. It has no place in London.
