Police across UK equipped with live facial recognition bodycams

Police forces across Britain are equipping their officers with body-worn video cameras capable of carrying out live facial recognition searches on passers-by, it can be revealed.

An investigation by i and Liberty Investigates found three major UK forces – the British Transport Police, South Wales Police and Leicestershire Police – have acquired cutting-edge cameras made by a UK company that are designed to carry out real-time facial recognition checks as officers conduct patrols and interact with the public.

London-based Reveal Media, a lead player in the global market for recording technology used in law enforcement, says in publicity material that its K-series cameras are the first body-worn technology available in the UK capable of carrying out live facial recognition (LFR) – a controversial form of computer-aided search that allows police to compare anyone coming within range of a camera in real time against a “watchlist” of wanted individuals.

Reveal Media, which operates in more than 40 countries, claims the artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced abilities of its K-series are capable of “ushering in a new era of operational effectiveness” for police.

Each of the forces using the K-series cameras told i and Liberty Investigates that they do not, and never have, used the LFR function. But the distribution of the devices to thousands of officers comes as the Government presses for a rapid expansion in the use of facial recognition technology, which privacy groups said risks turning people “into walking ID cards”.

Policing minister Chris Philp last month wrote to police chiefs urging them to use LFR “more widely” and has unveiled proposals to integrate the UK passport database, which holds the images of 45 million people, with law enforcement databases to enable retrospective facial recognition searches of the majority of the British population with “the click of one button”. By contrast, the European Parliament this summer voted to ban any use of LFR in public spaces across the European Union.

Procurement documents submitted to the office of Leicestershire’s Police and Crime Commissioner note that facial recognition is a key feature of the devices “that could be enabled if the information security implications are resolved”. The documents, which note that Leicestershire Police has bought 1,426 “K6” K-series cameras, add: “The K6 will offer future proofing in terms of AI [and] facial recognition.”

Leicestershire Police said: “We are not currently using, or have previously used, the [live facial recognition] capability.”

Both South Wales Police and the British Transport Police said the LFR capability on their K-series cameras is not, and never has been, deployed.

When asked whether the Government had a view on the deployment of LFR on body-worn cameras in light of Mr Philp’s views, the Home Office told i and Liberty Investigates that the procurement and use of such devices were “operational matters for police”.

Campaign groups nonetheless point to the growing use by forces of LFR, which until now has been conducted using cameras mounted on police vehicles at big events or in prominent places, with passers-by warned via signage that they are liable to be scanned.

Among the events where LFR has been deployed recently are the coronation of King Charles and the British Formula One Grand Prix at Silverstone.

Experts said the adoption of LFR-capable body-worn cameras represents a significant potential expansion of the technology by opening up the possibility that police officers could scan and search thousands of faces while on patrol.

Pete Fussey, professor of sociology at the University of Essex and a leading expert on surveillance and facial recognition, said the introduction of LFR-capable cameras “risks turning every encounter with the police into a surveillance opportunity, precisely at the time when public trust in policing needs restoring”.

Pointing to the moves within the European Union to place strict limits on the use of facial recognition, he added: “Just as other democracies are moving to either ban or heavily restrict uses of this technology, the UK is accelerating its use.”

Mark Johnson, advocacy manager at Big Brother Watch, said: “Live facial recognition is a dystopian mass surveillance technology, which turns us all into walking ID cards. Deploying the technology in police officers’ body cams only makes it more intrusive and harder for the public to opt out of, and comes despite a total absence of democratic scrutiny.”

Many UK police forces already use earlier versions of facial recognition technology, which combine footage recorded on body-worn cameras with software to provide retrospective facial recognition (RFR) searches – a different version of the technique that allows pre-existing footage from a variety of sources, such as CCTV, to be searched against the police national database to identify suspects.

An investigation by i and Liberty Investigates earlier this year revealed a dramatic rise in the number of retrospective searches carried out by police forces, prompting concerns about the hundreds of thousands of innocent people whose images have been unlawfully retained on police databases.

Campaigners have pointed to the use of live facial recognition by authoritarian regimes as warnings of how the technology can be abused.

The European Court of Human Rights earlier this year ruled against Russia after it was claimed to have used LFR to locate and arrest a protester on the Moscow metro system. China has been accused of perfecting a version of facial recognition technology that can single out and track members of the repressed Muslim Uyghur minority.

The Home Office has previously underlined that any live facial recognition system used in Britain operates by comparing the features of passers-by with a watchlist of wanted individuals. Data and images of anyone who does not match the watchlist are instantly discarded and passers-by should be alerted to the possibility that they will be recorded.

The Government and senior police officers have in recent months voiced increasing enthusiasm for the technology. Sir Mark Rowley, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said in September that he believed retrospective facial recognition techniques had “immense potential” and could transform crime-fighting in the same way as DNA some three decades ago.

But senior experts have also expressed concern at a further rolling out of LFR.

Speaking earlier this year, the Government’s biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner Fraser Sampson said: “A camera on an officer walking down the street … could check hundreds if not thousands of people while on duty. The Orwellian concerns of people, the ability of the state to watch every move, is very real and that needs to be addressed in any future regulatory framework about the state’s use of this technology.”

Reveal Media did not immediately respond to a request to comment.

This article was published in partnership with the i.