UK Police Are Testing Facial Recognition on Christmas Shoppers in London this Week (theverge.com)

London's Metropolitan Police is testing its facial recognition technology in the capital this week. From a report: It's the seventh time the Metropolitan Police, the UK capital's police force, has trialled facial recognition in public. The technology has previously been used at large events, including Notting Hill Carnival in 2016 and 2017, and Remembrance Day services last year. This year, the technology is being used Monday and Tuesday of this week in Soho, Piccadilly Circus, and Leicester Square -- all major shopping areas in the heart of the city.

Cameras are fixed to lampposts or deployed on vans, and use software developed by Japanese firm NEC to measure the structure of passing faces. This scan is then compared to a database of police mugshots. The Met says a match via the software will prompt officers to examine the individual and decide whether or not to stop them. Posters will inform the public they're liable to be scanned while walking in certain areas, and the Met says anyone declining to be scanned "will not be viewed as suspicious."

Comments

Re:Honest question

[ledow]

The story misses out the nice bit: Literally 100% of the people stopped this year so far by facial recognition were false-positives and released without charge.

Presumption of innocence only affects the courts. Arrest is a mechanism to detain people until you can ascertain if a crime occurred. Even *arrest* isn't subject to a presumption of innocence (you wouldn't slap cuffs on a presumed-innocent person).

Certainly "you look like a guy we are after" (in whatever form - identity parade, cop thinking he recognises you from a poster, targeted facial recognition, etc.) isn't subject to a presumption of innocence in the manner you're referring to. It has nothing to do with the UK, specifically, either.

Fact is, their facial recognition is useless (as is most facial recognition), so if anything all they're EVER doing with it is bothering "innocent" people and showing how useless their own tech is.

*A cop needs to be able to stop you. Presumption of innocence cannot play a part in that. Yes, they can stop you for almost no reason (you look like the guy, or you have the same colour car). It's what they do AFTER that that matters. In the UK, that means they quickly look you up, realise you're not the guy on the database and you walk off. Or you refuse and walk off (they could arrest you but then they could be subject to a lot of problems regarding insufficient cause for arrest).

One of the questions the dickheads that "advise" you what to say to a cop include is "Am I free to go?" It's not a bad question. It's about the only one that an innocent person is likely to ask (all that other refusing-to-co-operate shit is just going to get you arrested, even if that's "wrong").

Arrest is detaining you until the situation is clear.
A charge is alleging that you performed a particular and specific named criminal act.
A conviction is when a judge agrees with the latter.

Arrest may be a pain in the arse, but it's a tool that needs to be used. They have made literally zero proper arrests with this facial recognition stuff. They stopped a few people, confirmed their ID, let them go. They would get better results by just sticking a cop in a market and saying "Do you recognise anyone?"... likely they'll catch at least one person subject to a public-banning order, commonly arrested for shoplifting, or some known driving offence (getting into a car when the cop knows they are banned, etc.).