Live Facial Recognition: Police Guidance

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Monday 4th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I disagree with everything that the noble Lord has said. I think every police force in the country uses retrospective facial recognition. Watch-lists are deleted upon use at a deployment, so there is no issue regarding ongoing data protection. Importantly, just as CCTV and retrospective recognition are still used to detect criminals, missing persons and vulnerable people, so is the application of LFR.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I refer the House to my membership of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, whose pertinent report of last week has been referred to. Given the intrusive nature and racially discriminatory potential of this technology, why does the Minister not agree that legislation would be preferable to the police writing their own guidance, which some of us find, in this case, to be permissive and wholly unsatisfactory?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

There already is a legal framework. In terms of bias, I quote from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. It found that NEC, which is the technology that the police use, provided

“algorithms for which false positive differentials are undetectable”

and that the algorithm

“is on many measures, the most accurate we have evaluated”.

It is for the police, within the legal framework, to decide how and in what situation to deploy this technology.