September 29, 2023		INDEX
"Police expanding use of facial recognition despite ban"
Police forces in the UK are secretly ramping up their use of facial recognition though many are denying they are using it at all, says the campaign group Liberty. Police made more than 85,000 facial recognition searches on the Police National Database in 2022. This is more than four times as many searches as they made in 2021. When asked whether they had used the technology in 2022, 13 police forces denied doing so and 11 declined to comment, says Liberty. But records show that all the forces in question conducted hundreds of searches on the PND last year. Photographs or CCTV stills can be compared against more than 16 million photographs on the database. Met Police Commissioner Mark Rowley said last week the tech was "the next step" in police use of facial recognition and showed "immense potential". But Liberty says that as many as hundreds of thousands of images on the database are of people who have never been charged with or convicted of a crime. In 2012, the High Court found that retention of such images was unlawful, but police forces continue to retain them anyway, according to Liberty. Both the Government’s own biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner Fraser Sampson and the National Police Chiefs’ Council have warned forces about the practice. See original Liberty story.
INDEX Jonathan Brind	September 29, 2023