The U.K. government is ramping up the use of public facial recognition, saying it wants to use it to tackle the country’s rising rates of retail fraud.
The Home Office says it plans to invest £55.5 million over the next four years, including £4 million to be spent this year on bespoke mobile units that can be deployed to high streets across the country.
Live facial recognition will be used in crowded areas to identify people wanted by the police—including repeat shoplifters—with images compared with specific people wanted by the police or banned from that particular location. Police in the area will then be alerted to try and track them down.
“To turn a blind eye to retail crime shakes the foundations of law and order which protect our society and that is unacceptable. We are enhancing our plan and doubling down on the zero-tolerance approach needed to fight back,” said home secretary James Cleverly.
“The number of offenders being charged for these crimes is increasing and while I want to see more people face consequences for their actions, our plan is designed to help put a stop to these crimes happening in the first place.”
The announcement follows the creation of Project Pegasus, which sees retailers sharing intelligence with police and running their CCTV images through police databases using facial recognition technology, in order to identify more offenders. However, the plan has drawn fire from civil liberties organizations.
Silkie Carlo, director of civil liberties NGO Big Brother Watch described the plan as ‘completely absurd’, given that police currently only turn up to 40 per cent of violent shoplifting incidents.
“Rather than resourcing police to actively pursue people who pose a risk to the public, the government’s investment in facial recognition cameras for retail offenses relies on shoplifters walking in front of marked police cameras, and as such will effectively target the lowest hanging fruit,” she said.
“It’s an abysmal waste of public money on a dangerously authoritarian and inaccurate technology that neither the public nor parliament has ever voted on. This will cost not only the public purse but the public’s privacy and civil liberties.”
The Home Office has been showing enthusiasm for facial recognition for some time, with policing minister Chris Philp last year telling the Police Superintendents’ Association Conference that he’d like to see a greater use of the technology with video footage recovered from CCTV cameras, Ring doorbells and mobile phones.
“I think it will have over the next few years just an enormous impact on our ability to lock up criminals and it’s an efficient way of investigating crime because, particularly if the victim or the shop or whatever it is emails in the footage, that’s a very efficient way of getting evidence that can then be acted upon,” he said.
Meanwhile, individual police forces, including the Metropolitan Police, are using live facial recognition cameras in streets across the country—despite the fact that its accuracy has been found to be questionable at best.
“Live facial recognition may be commonplace in China and Russia, but these government plans put the UK completely out of sync with the rest of the democratic world,” said Carlo.
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