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London's Met Police: We won't use facial recognition at Notting Hill Carnival

Peter2 Silver badge

Hmm.

The idea (presumably) is to identify the small minority of football holigan/anarchist types who were banned from their events of choice and who enjoy starting a riot by tossing bricks or molotov cocktails over the heads of peaceful protesters, and using the peaceful protesters as unwilling and unwitting human shields against the police response.

If the police are simply checking against those people and then doing a stop and search on them to see if they are carring... shall we say contraband? then personally I think that's fine. I think that most of the peaceful protesters who intend on attending a peaceful protest would agree with this too, since nobody really enjoys having molotov cocktails tossed over their heads and it's in everybody's interests to keep peaceful protests peaceful.

However, if the police are doing it with the intent of keeping lists for a long period of "Citizen 123456 attended a protest about $cause" then I think we can agree that's a serious problem that ought to be dealt with.

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