Big Brother is watching: Croydon was the first place in the country to have AI-powered ‘RoboCop’ cameras installed permanently
Three years since ‘RoboCop’-style surveillance cameras were trialled on the streets of of Croydon, the government is only now proposing legislation which will provide ‘parameters’ for their use
Croydon West MP Sarah Jones, the policing minister in the Burnham government, has said that there will be legislation to set “parameters and principles” for the police’s use of Live Facial Recognition Cameras.
New laws for LFRs will replace a “patchwork” of “piecemeal legislation”, Jones has told the BBC.
The use of LFRs in this country were first trialled by the Metropolitan Police on North End, in Croydon in 2023, in what is now Jones’s constituency. It is also where the first permanent LFRs have been installed, in what human rights groups have described as an “alarming escalation” of the AI-powered surveillance technology.
The Met points to more than 3,000 arrests in the past two years “making London safer”. Figures for the number of convictions arising from these arrests is not provided.
‘Parameters’: three years after the Met started operating LFR in Croydon, minister Sarah Jones is proposing legislation
The Orwellian technology is being used without any legal safeguards in place, and the random nature of some of the arrests have led to growing concerns.
The technology “is treating everyone who walks by as a suspect by default – you have to prove that you’re not someone that the police is looking for”, according to Big Brother Watch.
Belatedly, the government ran a public consultation last year, and now it is Jones’s job to set out its response to go before Parliament.
Jones told BBC London that where concerns have been raised they are “around proportionality, how far and wide are you going to go with this technology, what could it become”.
Human rights campaigners have lobbied for legislation that defines how the police use the cameras, which map a person’s unique facial features and match them against faces on watchlists. There are significant data protection issues over the cameras, which civil rights campaigners maintain tend to flag up people of colour disproportionately.
Jones said that the laws would set out what LFR can, or cannot, be used for. “For example, if I had an outstanding parking fine, I would not expect this technology to be used for that. We have to use it proportionately. We have to use it in an intelligence-led way.
“And I think we also have to be clear that there will be some oversight.”
The legislation is likely to create an independent watchdog to provide that oversight.
The cameras were first trialled under a Conservative government, which provided no legislative guidelines for the police’s use of a tool which has been described as “stop and search on steroids”.
Orwellian: the use of LFR cameras has been described as ‘Un-British’
Jasleen Chaggar, senior legal and policy officer at Big Brother Watch, told BBC London: “The way in which facial recognition technology works is it’s an indiscriminate tool which scans the face of every single person who walks by the camera.
“And that’s doing something that’s fundamentally un-British, because in this country you have the presumption of innocence.”
Chaggar was critical of the Home Office’s slow response to its consultation. “All the while, facial recognition has been rolled out in train stations and Tube stations and shops and supermarkets across the country.
“We all want serious criminals off the street, but this technology puts the burden of policing on law-abiding citizens.
“Why should people who have done absolutely nothing to arouse the suspicion of the authorities have their identity biometrically checked, in a way that’s as sensitive as giving away your fingerprints or your DNA, just as they go about their daily lives?”
The Met insists the way it operates the technology has been assessed as being accurate and fair by the National Physical Laboratory.
Following the pilot in Croydon, the Met is planning to expand its use of static LFRs to the West End and Soho next month.
Read more: Big Brother arrives in Croydon with Orwellian police cameras
Read more: MP Jones welcomes High Court ruling on RoboCop cameras
Read more: Met claims 103 arrests during facial recognition camera trial
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