Police deny Notting Hill Carnival face recog tech led to wrongful arrest The Metropolitan Police has denied that use of its dubious facial recognition technology at the Notting Hill Carnival in London led to someone being wrongfully arrested. The Brit force's denial contradicts an observer who spoke to constables operating the facial recognition system on the day. News reports suggested that …
The Data Protection Act 1998 gives people a legal right to demand copies of information held about them, including CCTV images and related data. It is estimated that around two million people enter the general area of the annual carnival.
If say 10% of the attendees requested the CCTV of them in a suitably vague way "I was wearing blue jeans and was there mid-afternoon", then I'm sure that 200k DPA requests should lessen Inspector Knacker's enthusiasm somewhat...
As the story goes, Pablo Picasso once got mugged on the street. When he was trying to describe the mugger, one of police officers had a bright idea: "You are a famous artist after all. Why don't you draw us a sketch?" He duly did so. And it was a big success - by the next day police had arrested an unprecedented number of suspects. Five men, three women, two dogs, a horse with a chariot, two sewing machines and a bicycle.
"It's great - you can even remove an innocent mans head with seven dum dum bullets and get away scott free."
It's better than that, you get to be Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police!
(Let's vilify the person who gave the order, not the copper who was told they were dealing with a dangerous terrorist)
He was released when it was established that the grounds for his arrest no longer existed. If you're arrested because PNC is still showing an outstanding warrant, your arrest isn't wrongful.
If they continued to detain him past the point at which the error was discovered, then the arrest would be unlawful.
He was arrested and released in the interval between the police compiling their list of targets and actually using it, presumably without double checking against the PNC. So there was no outstanding warrant when he was arrested the second time, which by your own logic made it wrongful. One might even go so far as to suggest it was harassment.
At the time of the arrest, the police officers had reasonable grounds to suspect that a warrant was outstanding, based on the information available to them at the time.
The fact that the information was wrong is irrelevant; the grounds for arrest simply need to be objective and an officer needs to be able to articulate them.
"You're under arrest because I believe you have an outstanding warrant"
"Nah, bruv. I was in court two days ago"
<insert custody systems check>
"Ah, so you were. Sorry about that, enjoy the carnival!"
Harassment, for ease of reference, requires a course of conduct and an intention to harass, and there's a general exemption for people acting in good faith.
I thought racial discrimination was illegal in this country.
Targeting a festival of black culture while not using the same technology at all other festivals such as Glastonbury is wrong.
and people wonder why we had riots (I am not condoning those riots in the slightest but when faced with injustice people usually fight back, America is a good example of this during the civil rights movement riots.)
"The fact you use the term "each other" shows that you are a racist"
I must have missed the English lesson where "each other" had a racial connotation. As far as I am aware that's an entirely neutral expression.
"You're.. white, aren't you?"
Pot, kettle, black, etc. Talk about enforcing racial stereotypes!
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Targeting a festival of black culture ...
Whilst I'm no fan of snake-oil technologies like facial recognition, I think you'll find that the police weren't "targeting the festival", but were in fact trying to maintain law and order at an event with a very long and very poor history for criminals trying to take advantage of the event, including selling and using drugs, theft, various assault and disorder offences, criminal damage, possession of weapons, and what looks like a strongly rising trend of sex offences.
Maybe you'd rather Plod weren't their at all?
Targeting a festival of black culture while not using the same technology at all other festivals such as Glastonbury is wrong.
I thought is was first used at the Download Festival?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/13/sneaky_use_of_facial_recognition_at_download_rightly_caused_outcry_according_to_blightys_surveillance_commish/
"a festival of black culture"
I must admit, that phrase puzzles me. What is "black culture"? People come from a variety of heritages, often with wildly differing cultures (and often competing, sometimes violently), yet there is this thing that people of a certain range of skin pigments have a "black culture".
No one would ever dream of having a "white culture" festival with white people with heritages from all over the world and claiming it was all one culture. Is it a bit like football fans? Sunderland fans hate Newcastle fans but all are England fans and best friends at an international?
"Targeting a festival of black culture while not using the same technology at all other festivals such as Glastonbury is wrong."
Glastonbury is on private property though.
The Police are apparently after wanted street criminals and discouraging those that would be breaking the law by being there. So surely targeting an inner city location where a higher percentage of the population is likely to be wanted - and has a very high density of people - and has had many issues in the past with street crime makes perfect sense for both public safety and efficient police resourcing?
The reasons they are doing this in that place and for that event it makes perfect sense and seems entirely reasonable to me. So for instance if i wanted to target knife crime, I probably wouldn't setup a metal detector in the Surrey stockbroker belt as a priority...But if I wanted to target Cocaine use then maybe it would be a good place!
They just check them out and let them go, right? It's not like they missed part of an event they paid for, or had their liberty restricted without cause, or were held for hours or days in a cell, or have to tick the "Yes I've been arrested" box on a job application for the rest of their lives, or have their image and biometrics (illegally?) stored in a leaky police cloud server until the sun explodes, right?
"But here in the US Detained means stopped then let go Arrested usually means"
Similar here. Although grounds for arrest are much weaker in the UK than the US. Since Theresa May clamped down on detention the requirements for both are pretty much the same (reasonable grounds to suspect), so new constables tend to arrest or turn a blind eye. Arrest carries with it broader powers than detention so is safer, legally, for the officer. Obviously it's more intrusive for the person being arrested, but that just shows you Theresa May's thought process - she wanted the ability to say she's done something rather than actually doing something useful. It also means almost nobody is detained for a search for knives any more, which is why knife crime is rising.
An arrest warrant is cast-iron grounds to arrest (technically speaking not arresting is contempt of court but I don't think it's enforced).
This can actually cause a problem. If you have been arrested, even if not charged in the UK, technically you need a visa if you want to go to the USA. This is mostly due to the difference in the import given to the term in the different jurisdictions but with the hassle/cost of getting a US visa as opposed to travelling there under the ESTA scheme.
I would be surprised if many holidaymakers entering the US are not technically in breach of their immigration rules for this reason and if some day their CBP gain full access to UK police records then this could become a bit of a problem for them.
"Detained or arrested ? I know it might be splitting hairs. But here in the US Detained means stopped then let go Arrested usually means hand cuffed, questions and or take back to the stations for further interview."
At one time, in the dim and distant past, people may be detained by the police, or even "help with enquiries". The default these days seems to be to arrest everyone involved (or just nearby). Questioning while under arrest has different consequences than questioning while not under arrest.
"or have their image and biometrics (illegally?) stored in a leaky police cloud server until the sun explodes,"
Of course that won't happen - after all, their record on not storing data related to people that haven't committed a crime is squeaky clean, isn't it?
I encourage you to persist in reading to the final sentence of the article,
"Hundreds of thousands of mugshots, mostly of innocent people not convicted of any criminal offence, are used to feed the Met's face-matching database. "
I saw them on two occasions on Monday.
There were two policemen, dressed in police gear (though not standard uniform, a bit more 'active' if that makes sense) walking around. One had a black hard plastic backpack on his back and a video camera shooting as if they were trying to capture the atmosphere of the party, long panning shots. If they hadn't been wearing police outfits they could have been video journalists.
I had assumed the backpack had the recognition tech in it. Reading this about a van it might have actually been transmission equipment to send a live feed to the van where the actual recognition may have taken place.
Anyway, if they wanted to do it in secret (next year?) they could easily do so. Just ditch the uniforms and it looks like news gathering.
I am not sure if they are gathering evidence. I assume this is mostly used for finding people who are already wanted. If you can walk around carnival and analyse thousands of faces an hour, send a few coppers (hundreds of them policing carnival anyway) to any possible hit and arrest the suspected hit if they match it can be a very efficient way to arrest many wanted people in one day.
I imagine that the evidence gathered in this would not not be admissible in court.
In the UK? I think you are wrong. UK does not have the fruit of poisoned tree doctrine. Probably the only developed economy in the world where the police is entitled to present evidence obtained via illegal means.
Not much new. It's about 15 years since I was last at carnival but even back then I recall uniformed Police very visible filming the crowd. There may be additional technology involved now but I'm sure the decision to be a highly visible presence is very deliberate.
No need for a mask, just some shiny clothing and make up, which you never get at carnival.
Or even just some new carnival glasses would do.
A carnival seems to be the worst place to try out this snakeoil that the police bought.
The police are there to ensure safety for all attendees, as such they should have publicised that they would be doing facial recognition and also have loads of cameras (even fake ones) in plain site painted yellow or purple (or whatever) to ensure those known criminals on their list stay well away from the event, thereby ensuring a peaceful carnival as the known bad elements would be too wise to attend knowing they'd be caught and potential bad actors would know everything is being recorded for later scrutiny.
It would get the public inside too.
The met should also tell attendees what will happen to the recordings once the event is over, when will they delete them, what systems will they feed the images into and for what reason etc.
Yes I realise they won't say and will keep the data on file and feed into future systems for all kinds of bad reasons they won't want to publicise or explain due to public uproar.
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