Facial Recognition: Police Use
Debate between John Whittingdale and Dawn Butler(1 week, 4 days ago)
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Sir John Whittingdale
As I understand it, the number of false positives recorded depends to some extent on the threshold at which the technology is set.
Dawn Butler (Brent East) (Lab)
The report by the national physical laboratory said that it had to be set at 0.6 for it to have fewer misidentifications, but there is no such thing as no misidentifications or people not being wrongly identified. It is also easy for a police service to lower that number. Because we have no judicial oversight, it is very problematic.
Sir John Whittingdale
The hon. Lady is completely right. I think the police are generally being responsible in its use and setting the threshold as recommended, but that is another example where there is no requirement on them to do so, and they could lower it. Regarding deployment in Essex, the chief constable told me there was just one false positive.
I attended a meeting with Baroness Chakrabarti, along with my right hon. Friend the Member for Goole and Pocklington, where Shaun Thompson, an anti-knife community worker, spoke to us. He had been held by the police for 30 minutes and forced to provide all sorts of identity documents, as a result of a false positive. On the extent to which it is occurring and whether racial bias is involved, there is some evidence that that is the case. That makes it all the more important that we provide assurances.
We have heard from several campaign organisations that are concerned about the use. They vary in the extent to which they believe it is a legitimate technology. Big Brother Watch has described live facial recognition technology as
“constant generalised surveillance”
and has said that it is
“indiscriminately subjecting members of the public to mass identity checks”
which undermines the presumption of innocence.
Liberty has gone further, saying:
“Creating law to govern police and private company use…will not solve the human rights concerns or the tech’s inbuilt discrimination…The only solution is to ban it.”
I do not agree with that, because I think there is clear evidence that it has a real benefit in helping the police apprehend people who are wanted for serious offences, but one of my major concerns is the lack of any clarity in law about how it should be used.
I am grateful to the Library, which has provided advice on that point. It says:
“There is no dedicated legislation in the UK on the use of facial recognition technologies.”
Instead, its use is governed by common law and by an interpretation of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, although that Act does not mention live facial recognition technology, and some case law, such as the Bridges case. Even in the Bridges case, the Court of Appeal found that
“The current policies do not sufficiently set out the terms on which discretionary powers can be exercised by the police and for that reason do not have the necessary quality of law.”