UK Law Enforcement Continues To Expand Use Of Facial Recognition Tech

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the doing-something-more-doesn't-mean-doing-something-better dept

UK law enforcement seems incapable of recognizing warning signs. Officials seem willing to compete with China in terms of Most Cameras Per Capita. And it’s not enough to just have cameras covering every bit of open space. Those cameras must contain questionable tech that is notoriously inaccurate, at least when deployed by UK law enforcement.

Despite these many public failures and its well-earned reputation as The Surveillingest Place On Earth (Western World Division), UK law enforcement is proving to be incredibly resilient. If you can’t do something well, the next best thing is doing something more. That’s the upshot of this report by Matt Burgess for Wired UK:

Backed by the Conservative government, police forces across England and Wales are being told to rapidly expand their use of the highly controversial technology, which globally has led to false arrests, misidentifications, and lives derailed. Police have been told to double their use of face searches against databases by early next year—45 million passport photos could be opened up to searches—and police are increasingly working with stores to try to identify shoplifters. Simultaneously, more regional police forces are testing real-time systems in public places.

Yep. That’s the end result of the meeting of government minds, both national and local. Don’t worry about fixing known flaws. Just hit the gas pedal and throw the rear view mirror out the window. At some point, the nation will be the safest it’s ever been, no matter how many people are wrongfully arrested or how many criminals benefit from a presumably similar rate of false negatives.

To that end, police forces are not only adding more cameras but they’re mixing even more live facial recognition by adding that tech to existing surveillance hardware.

Two police forces in England and Wales—London’s Metropolitan Police and South Wales Police—have embraced LFR [live facial recognition], using the technology for multiple years. (Police in Scotland, where policing is overseen locally, don’t use live systems but are reportedly increasing their use of RFR [retroactive facial recognition]). So far this year, the Met and South Wales Police have used LFR on 22 separate occasions, according to statistics published on their websites.

If there’s any positive take on this, it’s that UK law enforcement is still required to inform the public in advance about LFR deployments. Those deployments usually cover heavily attended events as an added security measure, even if the safety gains can only very charitably be called “incremental.” According to the data seen by Wired, nine deployments by the South Wales Police scanned more than 700,000 face but only generated two arrests.

Then there’s the problem with calling this sort of thing “police work.” Is it? LFR might be, considering officers are at the scene to respond immediately to hits. But RFR — which is far more common — rejects patrolling streets in favor of manning desks. This seems, at best, an ineffective use of dollars and talent.

Fighting crime has been reduced to playing Solitaire while waiting to be notified of a “hit.” That doesn’t seem like the best use of law enforcement resources. If all we expect from law enforcement is the capability to spend millions to create work for people that — like houseplants — are capable of reacting to exterior stimuli, then we’ve pretty much failed as a society. While it’s perfectly logical to use tech to get the most out of limited resources, turning the UK into a bunch of cameras in search of a suspect makes everything reactive. Detective work is now just “sitting around hoping someone walks past a camera.”

That’s just on the “we really hope the public servants we pay would actually work for a living” end of things. And I admit that is not a completely fair portrayal of modern police work. But in a country teeming with cameras, it’s not that much of a stretch to perceive detective work as mere desk jockeying.

And while that’s irritating to taxpayers paying these salaries, the far more disturbing fact is that the tech still isn’t trustworthy. Sure, the tech may be slowly getting more accurate, but across the board, facial recognition tech is still at its best when it’s making judgment calls on white male faces. For everyone else — a world population that makes white males a minority — it just doesn’t work well enough to be considered a step forward for the criminal justice system.

Not that it matters in the UK. Wherever a camera can be placed, it will be. And as soon as feasibly possible, the camera will be infected with AI that’s just as terrible at reliably identifying minorities as the cops running the systems.

Filed Under: facial recognition, uk