The UK government will introduce more live facial recognition vans to locate suspects for crimes across seven police forces in England. The vans are often used to better identify paedophiles, sexual criminals, violent offenders and suspects for homicides.
10 new vans equipped with cameras will be offered to the police forces, which can people walking past and check them against a list of wanted criminals and suspects. According to statistics from the government, 580 arrests have been made in 12 months in London thanks to the technology.
Live facial recognition has largely been used in the south of England as well as Wales, but the new forces getting access to this technology will be spread across the country, including Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, and Bedfordshire.
Big Brother Watch, a group challenging the police's use of the technology, believes that this is a "surveillance state" going too far. "The Home Office must scrap its plans to roll out further live facial recognition capacity until robust legislative safeguards are established," said Rebecca Vincent, interim director of Big Brother Watch. "Police have interpreted the absence of any legislative basis authorising the use of this intrusive technology as carte blanche to continue to roll it out unfettered, despite the fact that a crucial judicial review on the matter is pending."
Labour peer Baroness Chakrabati told the BBC that "some would say this is yet another move towards a total surveillance society."
These cameras are not always 100% accurate, which causes such heavy criticism of them, as some may be wrongly identified and arrested for crimes which can severely damage careers and reputations, even when people are wrongly accused of them.