UK's first permanent facial recognition cameras installed in South London The Metropolitan Police has confirmed its first permanent installation of live facial recognition (LFR) cameras is coming this summer and the lucky location will be the South London suburb of Croydon. The two cameras will be installed in the city center in an effort to combat crime and will be attached to buildings and lamp …
I normally don't like it when people complain about downvotes.
But what kind of fool would downvote that?
Unless they wanted to point out that the actual thin edge was when pig cameras started showing up everywhere in the first place. There really does need to be a mass purge of politicians who support ANY pig cameras in public at all. They do nothing to stop people being hurt, they're just turning the whole world into a police state.
Sounds like you should be on one of those watch lists. Advocating for purges of politicians. We've seen enough violence in terms of shootings and stabbings of MPs in recent years that this language makes me sick.
As for pig-cams - these are the people that put themselves in harms way to keep you safe when morons start rioting over twitter posts, like last summer - or were you among them with your mate Mr Yaxley-Lennon? You may not always like what they do, and police aren't perfect for sure. But show some respect. If you don't break the law then frankly you should have nothing to fear. Just don't vote in morons that want to turn the country into an authoritarian colony. Looking at the reformers there...
This sort of language and attitude is precisely why we should have these cameras country wide so that all those feral underclasses are kept in check. China has low crime rates and a functioning society, because they have perfected this system. The lack of democratic freedoms over there were an issue well before the cameras, so just stay engaged in the political process over here and you can keep your freedoms. Vote in morons and you get what you deserve with or without the cameras. Let's see how quickly grifters and feral youth are brought to heel if they or their parents get kicked out of their council flats as the cameras track their misdeeds. If you're advocating for a right to lawlessness and antisocial behavior as you seem to do implicitly here, you're part of the problem.
I am sure I'll top the down votes with this post but I'm over this constant moaning about police state this and that. Just hold your politicians accountable and these tools will be a blessing to clean up the current societal dysfunction. Behave and you'll be fine.
"these are the people that put themselves in harms way to keep you safe"
Sometimes, some people can still remember the miners strike and many other times the Police stepped over the line. Wayne Couzens and the thousands of Police officers that were found to be unfit for duty after background checks were done following his arrest. Etc etc.
The Police will protect you when a clear violation of the law has occurred, but I can't imagine the Police protecting the people on moral grounds...like being against the widespread use of facial recognition cameras.
"these tools will be a blessing to clean up the current societal dysfunction"
Please stop believing the Daily Heil's garbage.
Yes, we have serious social problems - especially on council estates and our inner cities. But dysfunction, no. If you want to see what societal dysfunction looks like, visit somewhere like Somalia or Haiti.
You are also very badly mistaken if you think technology can solve societal problems. It can't.
Grifters and feral youth won't be brought to heel by round the clock pervasive state surveillance. Here, you make the mistake of assuming these scumbags think the same way you do. News flash: they don't. They are unable to think about the consequences of their actions. That's why they commit crime. All-seeing cameras, databases, stasi-style policing and the like can't possibly hope to influence the behaviour of these arseholes or put an end to it.
My downvote is for choice of words.
In my experience, the moment you start using loaded terms in your communication you're busy with self-radicalisation - you add so much bias to your thinking that you can no longer think critically. The duscussion is about surveillance with facial recognition, calling them 'pig' cameras puts you (in my opinion, of course) outside the spectrum of people to have a reasonable discussion with because you have mentally navigated yourself into a rut. Being aware of this potential is a first step back to clear thinking, so I hope you see what I mean.
As for the topic at hand, the comment 'thin edge of the wedge' is approriate as in all those years we have never seen a reduction in camera count as the supposed threat they were addressing was eventually reduced. This either means they don't have the purported effect in which case they ought to be removed, or they were 'sold' to the public with a load of nonsense from the beginning to get more surveillance in place.
Given what I've seen over the years I find only the latter conclusion credible.
As mentioned, GDPR isn't included here or is excempt because its for "crime prevention". At our local Waitrose, the car park is managed by a 3rd party with their shitty T&C in small on a sign. So I checked their GDPR policy which was mainly wrong. They have ANPR cameras which are purely to be used for numberplates only. I asked for the right to be forgotten for my car, they said they keep the footage for "crime prevention", I said "No you don't, not for ANPR cameras as that's against GDPR. ANPR cameras are purely to be used for numberplates only and not traditional CCTV. They eventually, reluctantly agreed to delete footage of my car. Claimed to show evidence (which looked made up to me). Then I asked for the backup footage to also be deleted. They stopped responding.
This is one of the issues with CCTV, when you get cowboys that run them purely for profit and the racketeering aspect.
> As mentioned, GDPR isn't included here or is excempt because its for "crime prevention".
Using CCTV with recording for the purposes of crime prevention is something that requires a paid-for license from the Information Commissioners Office. And then you need to add words to your privacy policy (you have one of those, right?) to say what you’re doing with it. Likely this is handing it over to the local plods who will handle it under their own privacy policy.
Oh and once you’ve registered, the penalty for not renewing is they send The Boys round.
Absolutely! For those who think that this will only apply to "criminals", have a look at what's happening in the US where people are being held without trial for participation in campus protests that the current administration dislikes to see where this is headed, e.g. with Farage as PM
None of the people being held in the US are being held due to facial recognition cameras. They are either caught in the act, or caught through proper police investigation
But, for those who support these cameras, you really should ask yourself if you'd still support them if the opposition parties were in power. I, for one, will never support such tech.
"None of the people being held in the US are being held due to facial recognition cameras. They are either caught in the act, or caught through proper police investigation"
Except for the ones who got rounded up and deported on the say so of President Fuckwit. Without due process.
Rowan Atkinson has forever been a fervent and very well spoken defender of freedom of speech. This speech is one I have saved on my system and occasionally play for others who need help in understanding the issue.
But freedom of speech is not the issue here, but that other Human Right very much onder sustained attack: privacy.
Weirdly, the people that want to know and see everything about us are never so keen when asked to submit to the same surveillance..
They should instead ask whether adequately resourced conventional policing methods are not being used.
No. The Met should be explaining why they've abandoned conventional policing methods. They also have to explain how this or any other new technology is (a) better than the tools they already have (b) compatible with a free, democratic society.
Pervasive state surveillance might be OK in China or Putinstan. It's not OK in Blighty.
First, you have to find the politicians who authorised this crazy scheme. Or voted for it in Parliament. Then do it again for the ones who are accountable for running it. Good luck with that.
BTW, which act(s) of parliament said "put cameras everywhere" or "let's have pervasive state surveillance of everyone"?
My limited research indicates that the matter has not been voted on in Parliament, indeed there appears to be no legislative process for control or oversight of facial recognition cameras. The police are rushing ahead to try to set a precedent before Parliament, or at least the bit that is concerned with freedoms, wakes up.
Because there's not enough money for conventional policing methods and no one wants to do the job any more, thanks to the lack of pay, massive chance of being assaulted, getting blamed every time something goes wrong (regardless of whether it's the police's fault or not), filling in endless paperwork on IT systems which don't work (and then having to fill in the same data on two more systems which have different problems), trauma from being sent to scenes of horrible violence, murders, deceased people not found for days or weeks in flats etc, and constant repetitive cycles of dealing with the same criminals over and over and over and over with no hope of the situation ever really changing (because they either don't get charged by the CPS or they get a slap on the wrist in court) until the criminals either overdose and die, or do something really massive (like a murder) and actually get some prison time.
Honestly, it's a soul destroying job, I wouldn't want to do it.
Fuck 'em. If they don't want to do the job, they can quit.
The lowest paid cop gets the average wage of around £35K/year. Most get much more than that - without taking promotion into consideration. So lack of pay won't be stopping people joining. Neither will the lavish pensions. Not many people get to retire at 55. Cops do. They also get to escape punishment by "retiring" and collecting their pensions in full whenever they're facing disciplinary action. Nobody else gets to do that.
> adequately resourced conventional policing
Businesses that automate have higher growth rate. Efficiency gains from automation must be considerable for policing too. Labor is very expensive in UK.
US has high incarceration rate, but is also very productive. China has very high level of surveillance, but is extremely productive and having one of the lowest crime rates globally. China's incarceration rate is lower than the UK's.
Inequality correlates with crime, unless laws are very strict, near oppressive. But reduction of inequality, tax load and public spending are quite controversial topics in the UK.
Would love to see criminals arrested... but that involves police actually turning up to deal with crime. Once that starts happening in significant numbers across the UK, then we can move on to methods for detecting crime.
Just detecting crime and doing nothing about it means that it's really for selective policing, either for oppression of the poorer members of society or as is the target de jour protesters protesting things.
Very true. I was robbed and did my own investigation alongside involving the police like a "good citizen". I handed the coppers all the details needed to go and make an arrest or three when combined with electronic records, absolute open goal.
The coppers completely failed to cop, so it's left up to myself to process the offenders. No doubt the slovenly uniform-stuffers will whine about that.
Not just the wrong question in the sense of "you should be asking something else" but also "wrong" in a very fundamental way. It rests on the whole "Only criminals have anything to fear from this" fallacy that has been part of the authoritarian playbook utilised by everyone from the Gestapo to the Stazi, to the KGB - and ever more increasingly by the right wing of our supposed democracies, as they seem to be sliding more and more into the authoritarian space.
I've actually nothing against conservatism - a healthy democracy NEEDS a conservative voice participating in it to curb the sometimes-excessive enthusiasm of a diverse bunch of "progressives" and I can see that even though I probably fall into the progressive camp myself. But when the politics starts to slide into authoritarianism and autocracy, then I'd suggest that there are freedoms involved that should be "conserved"
On principle, under the valid and absolute decree that an individual is innocent until he/she/it/etc is PROVED guilty.
I actually looked into the legal requirements for ID, nowhere does it say that you have to own a passport only that you have to 'adequately prove' identity eg for getting a bank account etc.
If an individual refuses to comply with a given restriction as a formal act of protest then by definition this is 'Protected Free Speech' under the ECHR, and thus under the reciprocal agreement with the EU and US their rights are legally protected under the Bill of Rights as well if they are dual nationals.
This would under the appropriate law permit someone to take 'Countermeasures' such as shutter and LED glasses that block out relevant features in such a way as to reduce the effectiveness of such systems. Some individuals have taken it a step futher and had masks made with a generic face on them printed using an inkjet etc or other 'Creative' ideas like IR reflective ink.
"On principle, under the valid and absolute decree that an individual is innocent until he/she/it/etc is PROVED guilty."
This was revoked in the UK in 2014.
You only count as being wrongly convicted if:
"For the purposes of subsection (1), there has been a miscarriage of justice in relation to a person convicted of a criminal offence in England and Wales or, in a case where subsection (6H) applies, Northern Ireland, if and only if the new or newly discovered fact shows beyond reasonable doubt that the person was innocent of the offence"
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/lbill/2013-2014/0066/14066.pdf
Part 13, section 161
The onus is on you to prove that you are innocent.
I've wondered about that wording for years. The chosen word is, "until" and yet the sentiment is "unless." As I understand it - if you are taken to court, then you are guilty and it is just a matter of time/process until you are formally declared guilty. Why bother with a jury? Just being in front of a judge is declaration of guilt.
I'm surprised the form of words has never been picked up on before now. However, as we slip into a Police State, I guess the wording better fits...
My first time on Jury Duty showed me that a lot of people think like this.
"You could tell he was guilty as he walked in"
"Why would he be in front of the judge if he's innocent?"
"[The defence] is just needlessly poking holes"
Turns out he did do it- there was a heap of evidence in the last two days. But this guy was being convicted the moment he walked through the door.
"I actually looked into the legal requirements for ID, nowhere does it say that you have to own a passport only that you have to 'adequately prove' identity eg for getting a bank account etc."
As a born and bred UK Citizen, I've not held a passport since I was in my early 20's nearly 40 years ago (had a 10 year from about age 14, never renewed) and who still has the old style paper, non-photo driving licence, valid until I turn 70 in 8 or so years, proving my identity is only marginally more difficult when applying for DBS, security clearances etc. in that I have to proved a couple of extra bits of documentation because there's no photo ID. It's more difficult with jumped up jobsworths who don't legally need my ID because they rarely understand the law around ID. Mostly it involves saying "no" until they kick it upstairs. Even hiring cars or borrowing a courtesy car during mine's service often brings comments such as "that's not a valid driving licence" from younger people in particular, who I then have to educate.
Pointing out that I implied the presence of non-human (ie organic AI) lifeforms, which may or may not fit the legal definition of a human being (H sapiens sapiens) depending on which law(s) are applied.
I did read an article suggesting that routine DNA screening assumes that skin and hair cells are the same as other cells, this may in fact be in error due to chimerism. Someone can have two distinct genetic profiles yet be outwardly normal, and there have in fact been high profile cases that were only picked up when they went to donate bone marrow or do a paternity test.
Though there is little evidence that this has resulted in anything other than a few strange medical journal articles it is a source for consternation amongst geneticists as it implies chimerism may in fact be far more common than the literature actually claims, as high as 1 in 10000 in some areas.
Individuals who may have cybernetic implants are actually technically not fully human, though in the eyes of the law as it is currently written there is no current definition of what a 'Cyborg' is nor whether someone whose brain is enhanced or repaired with such technology is therefore legally protected should the technology malfunction or bad actors manipulate it from the outside.
Theoretically speaking this would come under the definition of an 'Industrial Accident' therefore not be subject to the normal laws but be between the manufacturer(s) of said technology to prove that it could not be blamed for the outcome in question.
On the subject of false identification, the presence of 'unrelated twins' or Doppelgängers is a source of considerable legal risk, and individuals have been wrongly convicted based on misidentification and circumstantial evidence combined with inadequate forensics procedures and other unforeseen events.
see https://www.aboutgeneticcounselors.com/Resources-to-Help-You/Post/chimerism-explained-how-one-person-can-unknowingly-have-two-sets-of-dna
"mobile vans have caught around 200 wanted criminals"
Oddly quiet about any false positives leading to innocent people being detained/arrested. Had the figure been zero then I am sure that would have been in the opening sentence, it's absence suggests the number was high enough for the PTB to decide it would embarrass them.
The Met claim a 1 in 6000 rate of false positives - that is, one in 6000 people who passes a camera will be incorrectly flagged as a suspect - but that's a somewhat misleading statistic. Of the people who are flagged as suspects, 85% of them are not suspects. The Met's explanation is that if 6000 people pass a camera, six are flagged and one of them is on a watch list, an officer will only have to look at six people to find their man instead of 6000. Which is fair enough, but doesn't account for the fact that there are 5994 people who weren't flagged and for each of them that actually was a suspect, there must also be an 85% chance that the camera didn't recognise them. This begs the question of how useful the system actually is, when it means officers will have their attention directed away from suspects in the great majority of cases.
Miffo is correct the Met's own figures https://www.met.police.uk/SysSiteAssets/media/downloads/force-content/met/advice/lfr/deployment-records/lfr-deployment-grid.pdf show an error (not on the watch list) rate of less than 1%.
Your right, the Met have previously claimed a 1 in 6000 (camera passes) rate of false positives. But which ever way false positives measured, false negatives can't be measured, without knowing percent of the faces seen that were on the watchlist. A rate of less than 1% for false positives suggests a very high confidence level is required to flag a match, meaning a lot of faces seen that are on the watchlist will be missed.
What's interesting in those figures is the number of true alerts that resulted in an arrest. At a guess it looks like no more than 50%. EG Town Sq, Walthamstow 22/01/25 4hr 22m watchlist 14919, Alerts 13, true 12, false 1, Outcomes Arrest 6, Other Disposal 1, No Action 5, Faces seen (Estimate) 12120.
So 5 of the people on the watchlist the police found warranted No Action, begs the question why were they on the Met watchlist? That's the outcome for half of the true alerts reported and suggests that half of people on the Met watchlist should not be.
I'm althoug missing how many man hours were put into those mobile van operations and how the ratio of man hours per caught criminal compares to more conventional policing operations.
200 caught does not say much if there is no information how many people were checked and how many hours of surveillance were necessary to do it.
You beat me to it...
Many years ago the local plod installed a red light camera at a very busy intersection near my office; one whose timing was so bad that almost everyone got a ticket. Late one night, after cramming a deadline, said camera magically got a black facial. To this day "I know nothing!".
How long before the coppers get fed up with wasting their time over all the false positives and quietly stop using it?
You're trying to get Met coppers to get on their feet and start patrolling the neighbourhood in the way that has been shown to have the greatest effect? If you can't prise them out of their patrol cars you certainly won't get them to come out of the nice warm surveillance suite with its coffee machine. Except of course for a profitable bit of overtime on a demo somewhere or to get brownie points for arresting Mr Winston Kodogo for walking on the cracks in the pavement or for wearing a loud shirt in a built-up area after the hours of darkness.
Not a lot seems to have changed over the past forty years, does it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teSPN8sVbFU (Is this your hedgehog, sir?)
Because at least then the arresting copper is supposed to justify that you look enough like the person they want, not just because computer says "Found one!".
Of course this doesn't actually work in practice either e.g. the number of wrongly arrested black people just because they're black.
Perhaps if there were some kind of penalty, and perhaps if at least some of it came from the salary of the arresting officer, they'd all be inclined to be bit more careful. But it should apply to all arrests, not just those based on LFR.
it seems like there should be more effort in preventing crime. Like better upbringing, stiffer punishment for violent behavior. but fixing the reasons people commit the crimes should be the primary addressed issue. Yes bust the criminals, but don't treat just the symptoms of the social issue...
> it seems like there should be more effort in preventing crime. Like better upbringing, stiffer punishment for violent behavior. but fixing the reasons people commit the crimes should be the primary addressed issue. Yes bust the criminals, but don't treat just the symptoms of the social issue...
Oh you mean like preventing landlords from eviction under S21 causing tenants to be homeless and end up in temporary accommodation, kids being stressed and not doing so well in school, not eating properly because no cooking facilities, leading to lack of adult literacy, numeracy and life skills, programs for which get cut about as often as an MPs lawn, leading to generational issues? And then people get hooked on drugs after trying them to dull the pain and stress and then go stealing, getting a criminal record, making be kids taken into care and repeating ad infinitum.
Yeah, thought so.
Over the past year the mobile vans have caught around 200 wanted criminals in Croydon including at least two rapists who would not otherwise have been caught.
Rapists, meh. They were probably hoping for paedophiles - you can justify anything if you're catching paedophiles. Rapists, we'll be lucky if they didn't hand them a job application.
Roboplod is strangely quiet about the number of terrorists these cameras have caught.
They've not provided a cost/benefit analysis either.
Since these two rapists were presumably already known to the police, why were cameras needed to arrest them? Has conventional policing stopped working? How? When?
In about 2014 when the police's budgets were slashed to the point where they couldn't recruit enough officers to keep up with the increase in population, so started turning to "efficiency improvements" like these cameras (as well as forcing retirement on any officer with years of experience to save on their higher salary costs). Now, with all the expensive officers gone (most officers have less than 10 years experience these days, often it's less than two), most of the police staff gone, all the extraneous buildings sold off, insufficient equipment budgets meaning more things are worn out or broken or just not there, IT systems which are ancient or don't work properly or both due to lack of funding to replace them or upgrade them, no money for training (most officers can't drive on blue lights for example due to a backlog in training places and insufficient funds to send them on the courses), and staff shortages everywhere, there is nothing left to cut and no more money left to save, yet it's still being demanded.
So you'll see increasingly desperate moves by the police from now on to try and claw any efficiencies they can so they can at least do something about tackling crime rather than just all giving up and going home.
"Over the past year the mobile vans have caught around 200 wanted criminals in Croydon including at least two rapists who would not otherwise have been caught. Those few people opposing this technology need to explain why they don't want those wanted criminals to be arrested."
Bullshit.
It may have led to their more rapid apprehension - which is a good thing. But it's fundamentally dishonest to make an absolute statement like that.
Unless the truth is "we weren't even bothering to look for them. Totes lucky that they popped up on facial recognition".
In which case, I'd suggest the issue lies with staffing and why there wasn't an active manhunt.
There wasn't an active manhunt because there isn't enough staffing, you hit the nail on the head.
Looking for wanted people is a much lower priority than responding to active crimes in progress, which are of course graded, with "immediate" being the highest possible grade. There are usually insufficient officers to attend every "immediate" grade call on most shifts in most parts of the UK now thanks to 14 years of budget cuts and "efficiencies" which aren't going to stop any time soon. So because they can't deal with crimes in progress everything else lower down the priority stack never gets done.
It's the Police, you know they will abuse them, like they abuse all new tech until prosecuted and even the laws are broken daily, because of the "above the law attitude" of most coppers, plain ignorance of of the law or the worst of the lot, making up their own laws and then charging you with a fictitious charge once in custody!
Those of you old enough to remember the "Ring of Steel" should look to history to see how this will go. For those of you not familiar, in the early Nineties number plate recognition cameras were put in place around London and later other cities to identify vehicles either known to be suspect for IRA bombs or vehicles that entered the city but didn't leave so that officers could identify a vehicle that had driven into the city and been parked somewhere.
All pretty reasonable but then someone had a bright thought and said hey while we are storing these number plates why don't we check if they are current on their motor tax and if not we can automate sending a fine. And later the same technology was used for speed monitoring where cameras are setup along the road at various intervals and if you travel from camera A to camera B inside a time that would require you to be breaking the speed limit hey you get a fine. Then later it was congestion charges, all using the very same technology just with faster speed, compute and interconections to fully automate the process.
And as technology improved and reduced in size and power it was fitted to police vehicles that could cruise past parked and moving vehicles and automatically check the plate numbers for any and all offences.
So you may say that's all well and good, all those examples are where people are breaking a law or not paying motor tax but that same information can be used to track your movements. Innocent or guilty. Now apply that same progression of the ring of steel to facial recognition, it's brought in to catch rapists and wanted criminals but over the next decade it will be used for other reasons and once in place it is very hard if not impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.
The bit that surprises me is not that this is being done but that it even made the news. The UK is one of the most heavily CCTV'd places in the world with some estimates putting it at 7.5 CCTV cameras per 100 people, only beaten by China and the US in sheer numbers. And I had assumed that all those feeds were available to facial recognition if and when it was needed. So I must suppose that the difference is live facial recognition rather than retrospective facial recognition?
I can see that the UK Police Authorities are under "pressure" to minimise their overheads (such training/deploying police officers and other staff costs) and using "tech" such as CCTV and facial
recognition might be one way to give the public confidence that crimes will be solved and perpetrators will be identified and brought to justice.
However, it seems that over recent times, a lot of CCTV hardware has been installed, RING cameras are available too and these are all in use (both within shops as well as on the street) and yet the crime rate is NOT going down and (for instance) shop-lifting is still on the rise.
So, it seems to me that the police are being over-whelmed by the available CCTV evidence being provided to them and they are not doing enough to investigate all crimes and so they are only spending time/resources on "major" incidents. (In my local areas, various petty crimes are taking place, CCTV evidence is given to the local police but nothing happens and all you get is a crime number to give to your insurers).
CCTV is all very well, but you still need officers on the ground to go and arrest people (or catch them in the act) and there isn't enough money for that any more. Technology like this is supposed to allow officers to be more targeted in their responses, but it won't help if there aren't enough officers (which there aren't).
...the massive ethical bankruptcy of RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000).
It's not how effective technology or legislation is in catching the 'bad guys', it's how effectively the wellbeing of the 'good guys' is upheld that really matters, especially when 'the system' fails.
Surely this should be deployed first at the Palace of Westminster, where the biggest criminals in the UK congregate ?
Or is the possibility that innocent tourists will be truncheoned by the police in public too great in such a place. Where the odds of false positives would be exponentially higher due to the greater crowd density. Maybe a few politicians getting truncheoned, might help stop this stupid idea from gaining traction, is the reason why it is not being deployed there.
"people opposing this technology need to explain why they don't want those wanted criminals to be arrested"
It's two rapists. I would bet money that on 6th August 1945 a higher number of rapists/paedphiles/other particularly horrible criminals were removed from the town of Hiroshima, never to re-offend or cost the state a penny in incarceration/rehabilitation costs. The person introducing this needs to explain why he doesn't support the nuking of Croyden as a measure to lower the number of criminals.
A constable is not legally permitted to arrest someone in the UK on the say-so of a camera (or another person come to that, you cannot be instructed to arrest someone) - they must be able to articulate sufficient grounds for arrest to justify why they have performed the arrest. They must therefore satisfy themselves using all available evidence (cameras included) that the person arrested is in fact the person who is suspected of committing the offences that got them put on the "wanted" list in the first place.
Therefore if the person flagged by the camera is stopped the officer will need to get other evidence that they are the wanted person, whether that's looking at their face and clearly identifying them versus a photo, asking the person for ID, looking for identifying features such as tattoos or scars etc etc. The camera alone will not be sufficient grounds for arrest.
That might have been true in the 60-70 year old fictional world of Dixon of Dock Green. It isn't true today. Even if the rules say what you claim they say. The cops can and will arrest anyone they want without any justification. Those inconvenient minor paperwork details can always be sorted out once the arrestee is back at the nick.
What's the difference between this and a police officer with photographic memory?
Traffic cops have to dial down ANPR as so many cars trigger alarms, but when they do get an alert for "in connection with" they usually find someone that their detectives would like to talk to. Personally I'm all for automating it and dishing out fines for no insurance/tax/MOT automagically - you know the sort of systems that most readers here claim to be experts at delivering.
I fail to see how flagging that someone wanted for assault/DV/murder/rape is walking down the street to a nearby police officer is a bad thing.
On the subject of carrying ID - most of Europe have an ID system and they seem to get by quite happily.
The matter of ID cards wrt UK and other countries has been discussed to death here, but as a quick summary: unlike other places I know about, the UK envisioned ID cards coupled with a monster database storing nearly everything known about a person. With very nebulous criteria about who should have access to which parts of the database and under which circumstances. Think e.g medical records and insurance companies.
The issue isn't the technology being used to apprehend a criminal, it's that it is a slippery slope, that is hard to undo, once in place. So today it's rapists, murderers etc. Tomorrow it's anyone flagged in the system in connection with any criminal activity, the day after it's anyone who has a flag against them for any reason, after that anyone who objected to anything the government did, lastly it's tracking anyone for any reason because the means justified the end.
Accepting the current reasoning is akin to saying you accept the "if you are not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about" argument. By that logic you should welcome 24x7x365 scrutiny of your every action, spoken or typed word. Most of us looked at China with their social score and thought wow, scary, imagine living in a country where your access to things are limited by how well you align to the party beliefs. Now imagine that commenting here gets you flagged and as a result your ability to get a job, pass a security screening, travel on a plane or leave the country is predicated on an AI algorithm reviewing your activities over the last 10 years, where you were, who you were with etc. etc.
You may think that's a stretch, that will never happen. I refer you to my comment above about the ring of steel, put in for the best of reasons and quickly co-opted for non terrorist purposes. Unfortunately it is the entropy of government over-reach. It's not a group of evil people sitting in a darkened room, it's ordinary people leveraging existing laws and technology to extend the reach, for the best of reasons in many cases, that slowly erode your privacy and evolve into a big brother surveillance system that would frankly be considered a stretch by George Orwell. And this is not modern thinking.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
— C.S. Lewis
“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”
― T.S. Eliot
"Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends"
— Isabel Paterson
People always trot out the "slippery slope" fallacy at times like this but it's always "just around the corner" or "they'll do it this time, just you wait!".
The UK could have started implementing laws like China years ago, yet it hasn't happened. We could have ended up like 1984, but it hasn't happened.
When will it happen? At what point are we actually on this slope? Because up until now it has never come to pass.
Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends"
— Isabel Paterson
That phrase describes perfectly the cult of the woke.
"I fail to see how flagging that someone wanted for assault/DV/murder/rape is walking down the street to a nearby police officer is a bad thing."
There are none so blind as those who would not see.
Here are just a few ways why this is a bad thing:
1) The snoopercam incorrectly identifies an innocent person as a criminal/suspect.
2) The images on the snoopercam's watchlist are wrong. So it correctly identifies someone who's on this watchlist but is innocent. This is not the same as 1)
3) The snoopercam incorrectly identifies a petty criminal as an international terrorist who then gets shot dead by an armed response unit
4) The snoopercam misidentifies a serial killer as someone who hasn't paid a parking ticket. PC Plod does nothing because making a minor arrest would disrupt their tea break.
5) Everyone's mugshot ends up on the snoopercam database. Because terrorism. Everyone's movements are tracked continuously. Everywhere. Always.
6) Those not on that database get flagged by the snoopercams as asylum seekers/illegal immigrants and automatically hauled off to a detention camp for deportation. No ifs or buts.
7) Real criminals/suspects use disguises (say David Blunkett masks or just a pair of sunglasses) so they can walk about unhindered by the snoopercams.
8) Cops will abuse the snoopercams to harass anyone they don't like: ex partners, people with dark skin, anyone who goes on a demo or campaigns for civil liberties, etc
9) Governments will abuse the snoopercams to harass their political opponents.
>I fail to see how flagging that someone wanted for assault/DV/murder/rape is walking down the street to a nearby police officer is a bad thing.<
I wonder if the author of that line would change his point of view if he is one of those unlucky 1 in 2000 innocents being flagged.
I wonder if the author of that line would change his point of view if he is one of those unlucky 1 in 2000 innocents being flagged.
I pull out my ID and establish that whilst I may look like a wrong 'un I am indeed not the wrong 'un that they are looking for.
Alternatively I could pull out my phone and monitise an auditor/victim video for TikTok before wasting the rest of my day in a custody suite.
Fuck off! There's no law requiring us to carry ID. Which means there's no justification for the cops to ask us to show it. And usually when the cops do that, it's to harass sections of the public they don't like. Remember stop and search or the suss law?
If a cop asks me for ID, I'll refuse. And challenge them to either arrest me (on what charge?) or leave me to go about my lawful business.
MOT records are online, they can check against those if they want to. ANPR flags so many cars passing the typical patrol that they tend to turn it down or off using it when a more obvious offence seems to have taken place.
I suspect that whoever dreamt up this offender cam system hasn't thought it all the way through:
1. The system gets a "match" on a person of interest and pings every officer in the vicinity.
2. How does it convey this message? SMS? Email? Automated radio broadcast?
3. How does it know which officers are in the area?
4. Assuming officers have been alerted that Scruff McScrote has just walked past a camera somewhere in the vicinity they know where he was, but where is he now?
5. Having a location without a vector is kinda meaningless.
6. What if the officers don't know what Scruff McScrote looks like - how will the image be shared with them?
7. I suspect this is impractical unless the person of interest is on the local top ten villains list.
So...
Facial recognition of all people (UK citizens, and visitors) travelling through London.
You risk
- your data not being protected
- a false positive - and stopped by the Police.
As part of the GDPR, people have the right to have that data removed. I suggest everyone does, swamp the system and shut it down from the start.
Lots of exemptions and carve outs for law enforcement in GDPR
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A32016L0680
To quote just one part of the 107 parts of the directive relating to law enforcement.....
"Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council (3) applies to all processing of personal data in Member States in both the public and the private sectors. However, it does not apply to the processing of personal data in the course of an activity which falls outside the scope of Community law, such as activities in the areas of judicial cooperation in criminal matters and police cooperation."
A quick CTRL F of criminal reveals 101 references, so yeah not likely to happen :(
And does the UK even fall within GDPR scope post Brexit? Genuinely asking, I do not know.
A quick Google reveals https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/data-protection-and-the-eu/overview-data-protection-and-the-eu/#:~:text=in%20the%20EEA.-,Does%20the%20GDPR%20still%20apply%3F,law%20as%20the%20UK%20GDPR.
"Does the GDPR still apply?
The EU GDPR is an EU Regulation and it no longer applies to the UK. If you operate inside the UK, you need to comply with the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018).
The provisions of the EU GDPR have been incorporated directly into UK law as the UK GDPR. In practice, there is little change to the core data protection principles, rights and obligations. GDPR recitals add depth and help to explain the binding articles. Recitals continue to have the same status as before – they are not legally binding; they are useful for understanding the meaning of the articles."
Recognition tech only works if they can see your face or if the clothing worn is know to an offender, most sensible criminals cover their faces so as not to be recognise, as in Police riot and snatch teams, who never wear identifying numbers, just us innocent members of the public who will be wrong tagged and heaven help the ethnics, as we know the accuracy sucks for them with racist profiling !
From very recent personal experience of being involved in a police incident, after I intervened to protect a lone teenage girl:
1) Probably not unsurprisingly, I was informed repeatedly that if the man's image (taken from one of multiple CCTV camera's within the store itself) was not already on the Met's DB then it would not be possible to undertake any further investigative action.
2) I have now been told that the image will be made available to the local PCs. Thus, if a PC happens to remember the man's image (amongst several hundred others) over the years, and comes across the man in question, then a form of facial recognition obviously occurs that might well have a high false negative rate.
3) For many years, a single trip to any shopping centre in the country and the surrounding streets leads to us to being recorded literally dozens of times, whether we like it or not. With regard to the incident that I was involved in this seems to be largely with regard to crimes against the staff and stock, since the staff did not get involved.
The big difference is who is doing the recording, the government or private businesses. In the US, at least, if a crime is caught on camera at a home or business the police can request a copy, and if you say no, they can subpoena it in court. And you can do the same.
If the government records it, you may or may not be able to subpoena it, depending on the law.
But the police don't have carte blanche access to anyone's recordings.
The question isn't why the people wouldn't want criminals picked up.
The question is why police are willing to happy to invade citizens' privacy rather than use proper, targeted police work. They just want to take the lazy way at the cost of civil liberties.
And how long before they're everywhere?
And recording everyone's comings and goings?
And how long before social credit restrictions like in China?
It's up to the British people to fight for their rights.
It's not about "the lazy way", it's that this is now the only way the police even have a hope of keeping up thanks to years of budget cuts and shortages of officers. There's no way to do traditional police work any more with the number of staff on hand, so they have to use systems like this to even have a chance of stopping at least some crime.
Here's someone who didn't stick around the place...
Kate Moss was born on 16 January 1974 in Croydon, Greater London, ...and raised in the Addiscombe and Sanderstead areas of the borough.
Moss was recruited as a model in 1988 at age 14 by Sarah Doukas, founder of Storm Management, at JFK Airport in New York, after a holiday in The Bahamas.
True. However snoopercams will generate orders of magnitude more false positives.
Remember too it's human nature to believe/trust/rely on what computerised systems are saying over other inputs and common sense. If a snoopercam tells PC Plod someone is guilty, then guilty they must be.
Good luck finding a custody sergeant who will authorise a detention on the grounds of "the camera told me they were on a wanted list". You'd be out of handcuffs and suing for damages within 30 seconds.
A constable must satisfy themselves that they have reasonable grounds for arrest before arresting someone, and a camera flagging them is not sufficient. That's sufficient for them to detain you and determine who you are, but that should only take a few seconds with the number of ID methods people carry around with them these days (bank cards with a name on, social media accounts, ID documents etc).
"the error rate in identifying suspects is less than 1 percent and the police typically have around 16,000 suspects on their watchlist."
That is a very high error rate.
Number of people on the watchlist - 16000
Number of people not on the watchlist - about 8000000
The camera will detect 15840 people on the watchlist, and 80000 not on the watchlist, total people detected 95840, % of people detected who are actually suspects, about 16%.
I see you have made the same comment a few times. It's here. It's the boiling frog scenario, it didn't happen all at once, it didn't happen quickly, it happened bit by bit and now you are swimming around in very hot water but don't realize it. If you went back in time to 1948 and told someone how things work today, they would be appalled. (and no, I am not arguing we should go back to that era). Just because you have got used to it or possibly are even OK with it doesn't mean you are not living in one of the most surveilled eras of history. Certainly, you can argue it's not as bad as China or the Stasi in East Germany but that's a pretty low bar to be aiming to be better than.
I for one, think it's ok to be concerned, to be wary of encroaching government reach into every aspect of our daily lives. But I am equally OK with the government providing services, and if the smelly stuff hits the rotating thing, I will happily call for help and be delighted if a policeman tells me they tracked the offender by facial recognition technology and he/she has be apprehended. But am I happy that I or my family are tracked and monitored 24x7? No. Like most things it's not black and white, it's a question of setting some line and saying up to here good, beyond here bad. And I guess your line and my line are not in the same place on the scale. And fair enough.
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