Officers across the South Wales and Gwent forces will be equipped with mobile software to identify suspects, missing persons and dead bodies, but campaigners label move ‘an industrial-scale privacy breach’
Police officers across two forces in Wales are set to become the first in the UK to be empowered with a facial recognition smartphone app that enables individuals to be identified “with the touch of a button… in near real time”.
The Operator Initiated Facial Recognition (OIFR) tool can be used to identify people that refuse or are unable to give details to officers – including those who are unconscious or dead bodies. The technology, which will be available to officers throughout the neighbouring Gwent and South Wales forces, compares the faces of people scanned bt the app with images in a reference database that “contains images of persons who have been photographed in our custody suites… or persons who have been reported as missing”.
Having gone through a testing process involving 70 officers, the software will now be used ubiquitously across the frontline with the aim of identifying wanted suspects, missing persons, or those at risk of harm, according to the two forces.
The police added that, if and when a person is confused for a missing or wanted person, “cases of mistaken identity are easily resolved and without the necessity to visit a police station or custody suite”.
Any photos taken via the app will not be kept on file and “in private places such as houses, schools, medical facilities and places of worship, the app will only be used in situations relating to a risk of significant harm”, the two forces claimed.
Trudi Meyrick, temporary assistant chief constable of South Wales Police, said that OIFR will “enhance [officers’] ability to accurately confirm a person’s identity, helping to ensure a fair and transparent resolution”.
“This mobile phone app means that with the taking of a single photograph which is compared to the police database, officers can easily and quickly answer the question of ‘Are you really the person we are looking for?’,” she added. “When dealing with a person of interest during their patrols in our communities, officers will be able to access instant information allowing them to identify whether the person stopped is, or isn’t, the person they need to speak to, without having to return to a police station. This technology doesn’t replace traditional means of identifying people and our police officers will only be using it in instances where it is both necessary and proportionate to do so, with the aim of keeping that particular individual, or the wider public, safe.”
During the trial period, which ran from December 2021 to March 2022, the app was used to take 42 photographs, including 39 images of men and three of women, and featuring a cumulative tally of 35 individual people.
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There were 30 uses related to someone being suspected of an offence, as well as nine for missing persons, two to try and identify a dead body, and one case in which a someone was considered to be at risk of harm.
Gwent and South Wales Police said that, during trials, the software successfully identified shoplifters trying to evade arrest, as well as one 15-year-old missing person from elsewhere in the UK, and one person who had died – a use case which the forces claimed “could prevent a family learning of a death of a loved one via social media or a third party”.
“The feedback from officers involved in the trial is that the app is user-friendly and a benefit to operational policing,” the police added. “There have been occasions when the use of the app has led to vehicles being seized from disqualified drivers who have lied about their identity.”
An FAQ document published on the website of the South Wales force says that “there has been independent testing to confirm no identifiable bias on the grounds of race, gender or age in OIFR”.
The document adds that the “OIFR system is not the decision maker… [as] it will ultimately be the officer making the decision as to whether a result returned is a correct match”, based on the information with which they are provided.
‘Papers, please’
In response to the announcement of the OIFR rollout across the two forces, privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch warned that the move “could turn South Wales into a ‘papers please’ society and undermine our right to go about our business without having to explain or identify ourselves to police officers”.
“This Orwellian tech is alarmingly close to introducing ID cards by the back door,” said the organisation’s head of research and investigations Jake Hurfurt. “In Britain, none of us has to identify ourselves to police without very good reason but this unregulated surveillance tech threatens to take that fundamental right away. We all want police to be able to work efficiently but mobile facial recognition creates a dangerous imbalance between the public’s rights with the police’s powers.”
He added: “South Wales Police will search against thousands of unlawfully held photos every time they do a face scan, and they should be fixing this ongoing industrial scale privacy breach rather than exploiting these photos for yet more surveillance. Trial data shows that South Wales Police disproportionately targeted ethnic minorities for face scans, which will further undermine trust in the police. The Government is long overdue in regulating facial recognition to protect the public’s rights, and should urgently stop police forces using mobile face scanning tech.”
