Big Brother is watching: who knew that Marks and Sparks on North End was where the local crims do their weekly shop? The Met’s LFR camera deployed in Croydon this week
The Metropolitan Police appear to have abandoned their regular Thursday afternoon appointment with local crims on North End, and after a month of trialling Live Facial Recognition on Croydon’s main shopping street, the force has mixed things up a bit.
Their special CCTV camera with added algorithms was rolled out near West Croydon on Friday and then again yesterday. A total of 13 suspects or absconders had their collars felt after being spotted by the Met’s latest hi-tech camera.
Yesterday’s eight arrestees comprised one woman (failed to appear at court for an offence of criminal damage) and seven men. Of those, four had bunked off court over various theft charges, one for drugs charges, one had broken their tag conditions, while another was a burglar wanted for recall to prison.
None of those arrested yesterday, according to the information released by the Met, were wanted for obviously violent offences.
Which makes the spin placed on the operation by the Met to justify the Orwellian use of LFR seem disingenuous.
“The Met heard concerns from people in Croydon about violence on their streets,” claimed a press release from Scotland Yard on Monday.
“To address this officers are working on a range of operations to identify and deal with those responsible.”
Last Friday’s LFR deployment “As part of the Met’s ongoing work to reduce serious violence in the Croydon area” made five arrests, of which only one was possibly related to violent crime – a man who had broken his conditions as a Registered Sex Offender.
The Met’s list of the five arrests made using the new cameras in Croydon on Friday showed:
- A 32-year-old woman for failing to appear at court for burglary
- A 50-year-old man for failing to comply with his conditions as a Registered Sex Offender
- A 34-year-old man for robbery – wanted by police
- A 36-year-old man wanted by the court for offences in relation to animal cruelty
- A 31-year-old woman wanted for failing to appear at court for drink-drive related offences
In terms of operating a drag-net to bring in people who have a case to answer before the law, LFR continues to appear to be effective.
And while it will have been disconcerting for Christmas shoppers in Croydon to discover that walking among them last month was some carrying a crossbow – stopped and arrested as a result of the LFR scans – the Met’s claim that this is all about “violence on the streets” appears to be overstated.
If it works and properly brings people to justice, then there will be few complaints.
Roll call: the Metropolitan Police’s list of arrests from yesterday’s operation in Croydon
But while Live Facial Recognition continues to be in trial mode, with Croydon being used as a policing petrie dish for the experiment, the Met appears to be trying very hard to discount serious concerns about how using Big Brother technology might impinge on civil liberties. And how it might not be as reliable as the police, and the Tories, claim it to be.
LFR technology scans the faces of people passing through an area against a watchlist of people wanted by police and sets off an alert when a match is made. An officer will then review the match and decide if they wish to speak with the individual.
Civil liberties groups have warned against the potential for misuse of the technology, and scientists who have studied the cameras’ work have found that at some settings, they can misidentify black people 11 times more than white people.
The Met, meanwhile, continues to peddle the line that LFR is more accurate than old-style policing.
“LFR does what the police have always done but with much more accuracy, precision and far quicker,” according to Lindsey Chiswick, in charge of LFR at the Met said.
“If there is no match, all biometric details are immediately destroyed,” they say, largely because that is a requirement of data protection legislation.
But the idea that this quick-fix, money-saving scanning system can actually replace time-consuming, conventional policing appears wide of the mark.
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