Fourteen campaign groups have written an open letter to the new Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, calling on him to stop using facial recognition technology.
Organizations such as Big Brother Watch, Liberty and Black Lives Matter UK have reached out to new military leaders on their first day in office demanding an end to “privacy-intrusive, inaccurate and wasteful technology.”
They claim that 87% of alerts generated by military systems are false positives. Among them were his 14-year-old black schoolboy in uniform and a French exchange student who had only been in France for a few days.
Police use a different method of calculating false alarms using the percentage of all people estimated to have passed in front of the camera, which is dramatically lower between 0% and 0.08%. said.
The campaigner’s letter read:
“If the use of this technology becomes widespread, these incidents will become commonplace, resulting in further fraud and increasing public mistrust of the Metropolitan.”
These groups argue that the techniques used by MET are less accurate for women and are used more frequently in areas with large populations of ethnic minority origins.
Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, said:
“These Minority Report-style cameras do absolutely nothing to reduce the rate of violent crime, but they risk putting the police on par with those of surveillance states like China and Russia. has no place in democracy.
“Millions of Londoners’ faces were scanned by facial recognition cameras without their consent, and many MPs were unaware.
“If the new commissioners are serious about effectively fighting crime while addressing discrimination in the police force, they are pointlessly wasting police resources with an 87% failure rate, racist and sexist. We cannot endorse the use of technology that is notoriously prone to false positives, many of which we have witnessed.
“It is critical that Sir Mark Rowley urgently stop police use of live facial recognition surveillance and take a more sensible approach to police technology.”
Liberty Director Martha Spurrier said: “We all have the right to live our lives without police surveillance.
“But the use of live facial recognition by the Metropolitan Police violates our rights and threatens our freedoms.”
Police say the use of the technology is focused on tackling violent and serious crimes.
A spokesperson said:
“The MET has primarily focused the use of LFR on the most serious crimes. Identify those with superior warrants.
“The operational deployment of LFR technology is supporting long-term violence reduction initiatives and has resulted in a number of crimes, including conspiracies to supply Class A drugs, assaults on emergency services personnel, and possession with intent to supply Class A and B drugs. It has resulted in numerous arrests for serious crimes: wrongful escape with drugs, serious bodily harm, and prison breakouts.
“The false alarm rate across production environments is between 0% and 0.08%.”
She said work is underway to test whether the algorithms used by the military are less accurate on certain groups of people.
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