North End and London Road are to be the first locations in the country to have permanently fitted Live Facial Recognition cameras, despite significant concerns about the legalities of the surveillance techniques and questions over their whether they even work
The dark future predicted by George Orwell in his novel 1984 is to become Croydon’s dystopian reality, with the Metropolitan Police being given permission to install permanent Live Facial Recognition cameras on North End and London Road, the first time this measure has been taken in Britain.
Big Brother really will be watching you, and it is likely to cause big bother, with civil rights groups and Green Party politicians suggesting that the Live Facial Recognition cameras are being used for a form of racial profiling, with their findings being prejudiced against black people, while they are also questioning whether the kit is even that effective at tackling crime.
Croydon’s Labour MPs and councillors have been silent on the issue.
Chris Philp, the Tory MP for Croydon South and shadow home secretary, was so excited by the news, he probably wet himself.
Trials of the Live Facial Recognition cameras – LFR – that were carried out in Croydon town centre saw 128,518 faces scanned for just 133 arrests – an arrest rate of just 1-in-966.
“This means that over 120,000 people in Croydon were tracked by the police for no reason at all,” according to Green Party Assembly Member Zoë Garbett.
In a similar LFR trial carried out in Cardiff, after scanning 160,000 faces, police made no arrests at all.
Monitoring the monitors: London Assembly Member Zoë Garbett
“Facial recognition subjects everyone to constant surveillance, which goes against the democratic principle that you shouldn’t be monitored unless there’s a suspicion of wrongdoing,” Garbett said this week.
Rebecca Vincent, from civil rights group Big Brother Watch, expressed dismay at this latest move, having posed serious questions to the Met about the policy during the trials over the past year. “It’s time to stop this steady slide into a dystopian nightmare and halt all use of LFR technology until legislative safeguards are introduced,” Vincent said.
Croydon councillor Ria Patel, whose Fairfield ward includes North End and part of London Road, said, “Ever since this announcement, my inbox has been flooded with messages from local residents concerned about this attack on their privacy and possible consequences for them.”
And the Green councillor said that, during the police’s camera trials, “Hundreds of people have been stopped and questioned by the police when they have done nothing wrong. There are even reports of people being arrested just because they didn’t want to be scanned by the cameras.”
Big Bother: North End’s Marks and Sparks was where the Met decided to start their LFR trials with camera vans in Dec 2023
The fixed cameras in Croydon are expected to go live in June or July, and will replace the near-weekly visits from the Met’s camera vans. The Met currently has four specialist vans, with two more on order.
The new cameras will be positioned on existing lampposts or attached to buildings and, according to a report in The Times, “will only operate when officers are nearby and ready to respond to database matches”.
Earlier this month, Superintendent Mitch Carr wrote to community groups: “I am currently working with the central team to install fixed LFR cameras in Croydon town centre.
“This will mean our use of LFR technology will be far more embedded as a ‘business as usual’ approach rather than relying on the availability of the LFR vans that are in high demand across London.
“It will remain the case that the cameras are only switched on when officers are deployed on the ground ready to respond to alerts. The end result will see cameras covering a defined area and will give us much more flexibility around the days and times we can run the operations.”
And there will, of course, be some “community engagement events”. Because there always is…
Candid camera: the Met’s Supt Mitch Carr
Live Facial Recognition cameras work on a system that scans people’s faces as they walk past, checking the images against the Met’s database of people wanted for a range of offences, and alerting officers if their computer identifies a match.
The Met claims that the data is immediately deleted if there is no match. The Metropolitan Police denies that their system exhibits racial bias as found in other forms of facial recognition.
But according to Garbett and City Hall Greens, “Over half of all facial recognition deployments last year took place in areas with higher proportion of black residents than London average.
“This highlights a troubling trend of disproportionate surveillance in communities already facing systemic inequalities and over-policing.”
The Greens say that since the first deployment 16 months ago, nearly 2million people in London have had their faces scanned, mostly without even realising it. In total, 804 arrests have been made.
At the start of the LFR trial, Scotland Yard issued a press release: “The Met heard concerns from people in Croydon about violence on their streets.” Of course they did: in 2023, there had been 11 killings on the streets of the borough. Yet LFR, had it been in place at the time, probably wouldn’t have prevented any of them.
The arrests made on North End on one typical day’s sweep using LFR comprised one woman (failed to appear at court for an offence of criminal damage) and seven men, of which four had bunked off court over various theft charges, one was wanted for drugs charges, one had broken their tag conditions, while another was a burglar wanted for recall to prison.
None of them were wanted for obviously violent offences.
Indeed, the announcement of the deployment of the technology comes as the Metropolitan Police and Mayor of Croydon have been congratulating themselves on falling rates of many forms of crime in the borough.
Ineffective: in trials of LFR in Croydon, there was just one arrest for every 1,000 people scanned by the cameras
The decision to deploy LFR cameras permanently in Croydon “marks a dangerous step toward normalising invasive surveillance technology”, City Hall’s Greens said, highlighting “ongoing uncertainty about the implementation, regulation and transparency of facial recognition”.
Garbett said, “The Met claims live facial recognition has been a success in London, but how can treating millions of Londoners as suspects be considered a success? The arrest figures are low, and it’s really just subjecting us to surveillance without our knowledge, with black Londoners being disproportionately targeted.”
‘We have not given consent’: Cllr Ria Patel
Big Brother Watch described the move as “a worrying escalation in the use of LFR with no oversight or legislative basis”. Amnesty International and the Index on Censorship have also called for a ban of LFR surveillance.
The Commons’ Justice and Home Affairs Committee has said that there should be primary legislation passed by Parliament before rolling out the technology any further.
Croydon Councillor Patel told Inside Croydon: “We know that facial recognition technology is not very accurate and is more likely to misidentify innocent people of colour as potential suspects.
“There has been no discussion of installing these cameras at Croydon Council and residents have been given no say whatsoever.
“We have not given our consent, and these plans must be stopped immediately.”
Read more: Crossbow seized on North End in second police camera sweep
Read more: Mayor Perry accused of ‘cover up’ over Sentamu case review
Read more: 1-in-4 Croydon police officers off frontline for ‘other duties’
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Great news. Most people support this. Time for Croydon to get a grip on crime.
Do they though? When did you conduct the survey?
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/survey-results/daily/2023/10/06/83ada/3
Thanks for the link Alejandro. I’m still not convinced that this is the way to reduce crime though, and paves the way for any future authoritarian regime to abuse the rights of the general public.
All government power could in theory be abused by an authoritarian government which is of course something we do not want. That is why we should implement systems, checks, balances and laws that prevent such thing from happening.
This is however just a technology, which is very scalable and effective, and comes at a great time since the police is already under strain from lack of resources.
A truncheon is a “technology”, but its use is carefully restricted by laws and guidelines.
There is no law that governs this latest piece of technology.
The survey respondents were asked this one question “Do you support or oppose allowing police to use live facial recognition technology in public spaces?”. There was no context given, just a reliance on assumed knowledge.
We have no way of knowing how little or how much they understood how these systems operate, their flaws and their potential for misuse.
If they had first been asked something like “Do you understand how live facial recognition works?” that would help.
They could then be given examples of flaws, such as, Nijeer Parks, an African-American man wrongly arrested for crimes due to a faulty facial recognition match. He was held for 10 days in jail and forced to spend $5000 on legal fees to go free.
For abuse, they could cite the mass surveillance of democracy protestors in Hong Kong, to intimidate people from joining protests and lock up those that do.
People could then be asked “How concerned are you that live facial recognition might be inaccurate or be misused in this country?”.
Finally, they could then be posed the original question, “”Do you support or oppose allowing police to use live facial recognition technology in public spaces?”
The results would be quite different.
The deployment of LFR in North End and the top end of London Road will do nothing to help traders in Surrey Street and Church Street who fear violence. It won’t stop young Croydon men murdering women. It won’t see any white collar crooks being arrested.
Just as with CCTV, LFR is not a panacea
Perhaps the Met could seek to reassure/get Croydon residents onside by pulling over Piss Poor Perry or any of the other corrupt crooks at Croydon Council for questioning, based on LFR identifying them as criminals, although it is doubtful that Perry could walk as far from the BWH bunker as the M&S end of North End ?!
Walking from the BWH bunker to the M&S end of North End is bad enough.
Why are people who will not be affected so worried about the cameras? The more that are identified by the cameras and arrested/charged the better. And if it means that the persistent shoplifters are kept away, so much the better. Cameras leading in to the Whitgift Centre / Centrale would also be very useful to warn security and stores of the unwanted in the vicinity. London Road northbound towards Norbury would also benefit!!
Jason Perry’s BladeRunners are going to be cutting them down any minute now…
If the Tufton Street massive are concerned about this, why don’t they bring a judicial review. Obviously they’re not going to be concerned about the disproportionate use against people of colour, but they’re funded enough to argue some of the points of law one would assume.
Anyway with the advent of ‘mask-chic’ this is all a bit moot anyway isn’t it?
How are the cameras programmed only to select or discriminate against non-white people? The machinery surely selects by the person’s features within its programme and those who do not partake in nefarious activities should have no worry even if stopped as quick id checks will mean that they have nothing to worry about.
The problem with FR is not in its use but in its misuse, are we to believe that the only people on the data base are those wanted for crimes or more likely that there is a set of data bases which are loaded appropriate to the occasion. Interestingly FR was deployed at the recent coronation to keep the royals safe according to the Met so not looking for wanted burglars then, but reports of solid upright citizens with republican leanings being pulled out of crowds and questioned were not uncommon . So can we assume that there is a database of people not wanted for any crime but have the “wrong” political beliefs, so you may ask what sort of political activist gets to make it to a database entry, that is an unknown and don’t expect any sort of honest answer from the security services. The Governments present and future will inevitably expand or allow to expand these databases to cover more than just criminals, and with the coming of quantum computing it will probably be able to watch virtually everyone at the same time. Big Brother is here now and watching and that surveillance is only going to increase.
Chris Philp hasn’t so excited in increased police engagement in Croydon since the Chinese Police Station opened. I’d assume if you’re wanted by the police the national coverage of this deployment would have warned you to stay away.
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These cameras only highlight the failings of the judicial system by managing to capture people on the street… who shouldn’t be on the street. Prosecution rates have plummeted from the high teens a decade ago to barely 5% these days thanks to austerity where for some reason crime wasn’t deemed important enough to fund properly. What would actually make things safer is properly funding things. All that will happen is criminals will avoid this area and go elsewhere. Well at least the 3000 Westfield flats that could be built some time in the 2040s might be nice and safe!
Determined criminals subvert the surveillance with hoodies and scarfs.
It is another false economy.
Thank you for the insightful article on the introduction of surveillance cameras in Croydon. I found the discussion on the implications for public privacy particularly thought-provoking.
It’s essential to consider that the deployment of such technology often goes beyond mere security; it can also influence community behavior and trust in law enforcement. For instance, studies have shown that increased surveillance can lead to reduced crime rates, but it can also foster a sense of unease among residents who feel constantly monitored. A less-known aspect is the potential for technology to be misused or for errors in data processing that may unjustly target specific demographics, highlighting the need for rigorous oversight.
It raises important questions about accountability and the balance between safety and civil rights. In light of these factors, how do you think communities can effectively voice their concerns while still advocating for public safety measures?
The ‘likes’ show that even IC’s Millennial progressives are in favour
The approvals are surely for the robust reporting, not for the technological imposition.
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