Theatreland and Soho are two must-tick-off stops for tourists looking to get the full London experience — as well as being places that locals will occasionally visit for a night out. But they’re also crime hotspots: the West End and Soho remain among London’s most crime-hit areas, with theft, robbery and violence among the offences most commonly recorded.
To try and tackle that scourge, the Metropolitan Police plans to expand a trial the force says was successful in tackling crime in Croydon into more densely populated areas. Some 173 arrests were made after suspects were identified using live facial recognition (LFR) technology in Croydon, the Met says, with only one face out of 470,000 scanned during a six-month pilot being incorrectly identified. The Met has pointed to individual Croydon cases that have since resulted in prison sentences, but it has not published a full breakdown for all 173 arrests made during the six-month pilot.
“We want to build on our success by introducing this capability to the West End and Soho by December,” said Sir Mark Rowley, the Met commissioner. “The use of static cameras will help us continue cutting crime in high-footfall areas in central London.”
“If you haven’t been a society in which you don’t know if you’re being watched at any given time, there’s a chilling effect”
Jasleen Chaggar, senior legal and policy officer at civil liberties group Big Brother Watch
The goal is to put it in place in time for the pre-Christmas period. But what impact will it have on everyday life in these areas?
“If you haven’t been a society in which you don’t know if you’re being watched at any given time, there’s a chilling effect,” says Jasleen Chaggar, senior legal and policy officer at civil liberties group Big Brother Watch. Live facial recognition is presented as a more advanced form of CCTV. But campaigners and surveillance researchers argue it’s far more intrusive. While CCTV records scenes, facial recognition scans faces, processes biometric data and checks people against a watchlist. That means hundreds of thousands of people who are not suspected of any crime can still have their faces scanned as they go about their lives.
Reversing the logic of policing
The Met says biometric templates created from people who do not trigger an alert are deleted automatically and immediately, while LFR watchlists are deleted after deployments. However, CCTV footage from deployments can be retained for up to 31 days, and longer in limited circumstances.
“It’s telling every single person who appears on camera, is this someone we might want to talk to?” says Chaggar. That reverses the traditional logic of policing, she argues. Ordinarily, police identify a suspect and then deploy surveillance. Live facial recognition starts with the crowd and works backwards.
Pete Fussey, a surveillance expert at the University of Southampton, says the issue is not simply whether the technology can help catch people. “The case for deployment hasn’t been made publicly and robustly,” he says. “Often what we hear is that we need this technology to keep the public safe. Nobody disputes that but everybody has a right to privacy, even in the public space,” he says. If police want to interfere with that right, he argues, they need to show that doing so is necessary and proportionate.
“The case for live facial recognition, and in particular to rolling it out into static cameras in particular locations is still unproven,” says Marion Oswald, professor of law at Northumbria University. “We don’t know enough about what the benefits are and what the consequences are, as well.”
That is where critics believe the current rollout is vulnerable. The Met points to the arrests made in Croydon, and the tiny number of incorrect matches. But Fussey argues that the force has not made enough of a public case for why fixed cameras are needed in these specific areas. Oswald also points out: “Soho at night is a very different environment to the environment that the evaluation was done in. We don’t really know how these tools are going to perform in these different environments.”
The cost of the Croydon pilot and planned West End rollout has not been published. The Home Office says it spent £2.8 million last year on national live facial recognition capabilities, including vans and fixed location pilots, and a further £6.6 million this year.
Legal vacuums and cost issues
Chaggar says the UK lacks the legal framework needed for such a step. “At the moment there aren’t any laws that specifically mention facial recognition,” she says. Big Brother Watch wants tighter rules to sharply restrict how it is used.
Fussey also questions whether the cameras are the most effective use of police resources. Live facial recognition is often described as efficient because an algorithm does the initial scanning. But, he says, it is not simply a computer spotting suspects in the corner. Officers are needed to monitor the system, intervene when a match is made, manage the public-facing operation, produce communications and carry out the wider governance around it.
“If at the end of that you’re only catching a few minor offenders, then there’s a really important question of whether finite police resources could be properly redirected for public safety in more effective ways,” he says.
There is also the question of who feels the weight of surveillance most heavily. “A white middle-class professor like me probably does have nothing to fear from the police, but people from other demographics absolutely mistrust the police, and they see it as a much more hostile act,” says Fussey.
The question that we’re about to figure out, live on the streets of London, is as much whether the cameras can find wanted people as what kind of public space London is willing to create to make it work.
