Police force will be 'extremely cautious' as it ramps up use of facial recognition

Thames Valley Police is ramping up its use of AI-powered facial recognition to spot suspects – but will be ‘extremely cautious’ in its application, the Police and Crime Commissioner has said.

The force is ‘at the forefront of technological advancements in policing,’ according to a March report – and is ‘setting a benchmark’ for the integration of technologies in law enforcement.

TVP ‘employs 10 digital workers’, equating to the productivity of 34 full-time employees. These handle about 45,000 hours of work a year.

Much of this work is automation of administrative processes, help with crime reports, and automation for advising an officer that a victim is looking for an update on their crime.

The strategy for Artificial Intelligence (AI) is still developing and TVP is ‘considering legal and ethical implications’.

At a meeting of the Thames Valley Police and Crime Panel on Friday (March 14), the force’s PCC, Matthew Barber, said there had been increased use of facial recognition software within the force, which can help identify suspects.

However, this is of the ‘retrospective’ variety of facial recognition – ie, analysis of past images or footage to identify individuals after an event.

Given the similarity of this process to using a human being to make an identification, Mr Barber said members of the public appear to be fairly comfortable with that.

“All it does is save human hours of going through photo albums,” he explained.

The technology also has a fairly high success rate in identifying people correctly compared to humans.

Mr Barber said that nationally, there has been a single case where police arrested the wrong person off the back of facial recognition software – and that person was the identical twin of the person actually responsible.

“That doesn’t prove the technology is flawless. But you’ve always got to remember [there is] always a human being at the end of it,” he said.

By virtue of having police officers show up to make arrests in person, there is always a ‘backstop’ to any failures in the technology, he said.

Facial recognition of the future

The other side of facial recognition is live facial recognition. This can scan and identify faces in real-time using live camera feeds, altering authorities if there is a match with a person of interest.

But contrary to what some people believe, there are no live facial recognition vans roaming the country and spying on people, Mr Barber said.

He said the reality of live facial recognition is a far cry from the science fiction public perception of it – of a police state that tries to crack down on crimes that haven’t happened yet.

“Frankly we struggle to have the resources to address the real-world crime issues,” he said.

Mr Barber acknowledged that the public would be ‘rightly concerned’ if police were using live facial recognition to ‘follow innocent people around or find out things about them.’

“That would be ‘really intrusive,” he said. “That’s not the world we’re in and that’s not the world we should ever be in.

He is keen that police should have access to modern tools – but that ‘doesn’t mean that police should use every tool at their disposal’, if it is too great an imposition of on people’s liberties.

Overall, the technology is ‘just a tool’ and ultimately, it will be humans that continue to make the decisions, Mr Barber added.

He also highlighted that it is ‘not an easy thing’ to conduct live facial recognition – there still need to be as many police to make arrests as there are suspects on the screen. That makes it a resourcing issue.

“It’s not a matter of just turning the technology on,” he said.

Councillor Stephanie Steevenson of West Berkshire Council (Lib Dem, Thatcham Central) asked how TVP was being mindful of security in today’s world.

“We know the hackers and scammers are always ahead of the game and AI is capable of putting any face into any video or any picture,” she said.

“I’m just concerned that we embrace the technology, taking on all of those risks, without actually knowing how to handle them.

“I hope that you’re extremely cautious about what could go wrong.”

Mr Barber confirmed that he is, indeed, cautious of this.

He highlighted the importance of ‘public consent’ on the use of technology in policing and the need to ‘take the public along with us’.