Last Updated on 06/06/2020 by TDH Publishing (A)
According to recent reports and a study by the University of Essex, the mistakenly targets four out of five innocent people as wanted suspects. And this is likely to be found unlawful if challenged in court.
For the sake of compiling an independent report on the London police service’s testing, Daragh Murray and Peter Fussey were granted, what the University calls, “unprecedented” access to six out of ten trials, which were completed between June 2018 to February 2019.
The named pair joined officers in LFR control rooms and on the ground. They also attended briefing and debriefing sessions and planning meetings. “This report was purely based on detailed engagement with the Metropolitan Police’s processes and practices surrounding the use of live facial recognition technology,” said co-author Fussey in a statement. “It is appropriate that issues like those relating to the use of LFR are subject to scrutiny, and the results of that scrutiny made public,” he further added.
The researchers argued that the Metropolitan Police always failed to gather legal authorization for the use of LFR in domestic law. Neither did the police took into account factors like the technology’s intrusive nature or use of biometric processing.
In addition to all this, there was insufficient pre-test planning and conceptualization, which later led to a number of issues regarding consent, trust, and public legitimacy. “In the end, the impression is that human rights compliance was not built into the Metropolitan Police’s systems from the outset,” said Murray, “and was not an integral part of the process.”
For the betterment and resolving process, both Fussey and Murray are calling for all live trials of LFR to be discontinued until all these concerns are addressed.
