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Crossbow seized on North End in second police camera sweep

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It used to be that Thursdays were late-night shopping in Croydon town centre. These days, the Met Police have turned Thursdays in Croydon into facial recognition day, rolling up on North End with their own “shopping list” of crooks and absconders, the armed and the dangerous.

Big bother: live facial recognition has been used in operations across the country, and now twice in Croydon

For the second week running, the police set up special cameras on North End to scan for known and wanted criminals. In the first week, they made seven arrests. This Thursday, they collared 10, including someone who was wandering the streets of south London armed with a deadly crossbow.

Live Facial Recognition – LFR – uses a live camera feed, or feeds, of people’s faces in crowds, and compares the live images against photos on a predetermined watchlist in order to locate “persons of interest”, generating an alert when a possible match is found. The Met’s calling it “precise policing”, and they describe the zone between East and West Croydon Stations as “hot spot areas”.

“We need to see more use of this technology across London as it has proved its worth in Croydon,” Andy Brittain, Croydon’s Borough Commander, tweeted last night after an operation on his patch that had passed off successfully.

Officers from Croydon worked alongside the Met’s Territorial Support Group for the operation. “As a result of 22 alerts by the LFR technology, 10 people were arrested for offences including threats to kill, recall to prison for robbery and possession of an offensive weapon,” the Met said.

There were another eight people stopped who are “subject to sexual prevention orders”. The police checked whether they “were complying with their conditions”.

In its statement, the Met added: “A further four people who also had other court imposed conditions were identified correctly and their conditions checked. There were no false alerts.”

Given legitimate civil liberties concerns about personal data and police state conduct, the Met’s inclusion of that “no false alerts” is significant. They also stress that “the details of anyone who is not a match are immediately and automatically deleted”.

The Met said: “As part of the wider proactive operation, officers stopped and arrested a 24-year-old man in North End for being in possession of a cross bow. Officers searched him and also recovered a pocket knife.”

Rare success: the Borough Commander backs calls for more Orwellian policing in Croydon

Ch Sup Brittain claimed that the operation has the support of the public and local businesses. “We understand their concerns about crime in the area and it is good to show the tactics we are using to reduce it,” he said.

“I hope this goes some way to reassure them we are committed to listening to them and taking action where we can.”

When you scan down the list of the people who were arrested, and consider that this is in a couple of hours on an average weekday afternoon, with warning notices up saying that LFR is being carried out, it might make you pause for thought about who is next to you in the queue at WH Smith…


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