Clearly, the problem isn’t that police can’t find offenders – it’s that they don’t know what to do with them. Experts say his case is the tip of the iceberg.
People might feel differently about live facial recognition if police reserved it for the most serious cases – such as hunting for fugitives, or searching for a suspect in the wake of a terror attack. But to integrate it into everyday policing, especially at a place like Oxford Circus where muggings, shoplifting and assaults take place in broad daylight and police rarely do much about it, smacks of a show-pony policy that distracts from the total breakdown of policing in the capital.
Throwing open the prison doors and then hoping people known to police walk past facial recognition cameras is fully automated incompetence. It is the unravelling of the social contract, the collapse of the rule of law and the demise of liberty that citizens of a free country are supposed to be able to enjoy safely.
Live facial recognition cameras will keep us no safer. They discourage police from proactively policing, from putting officers on the streets, or from proactively seeking criminals at their homes and workplaces. Instead, they result in police officers glued to tablets, waiting for an algorithm to flag someone of interest on the street.
And who among us really trusts police with such an extraordinary mass surveillance tool? The Metropolitan Police, we recently learnt, spent four months investigating a journalist for sending questions to former Cambridge professor Jason Arday about allegations of plagiarism. The force tasked five of its armed police officers to arrest a comedian for posts on X about trans issues. It is a force that arrests around 1,500 people a year for speech offences.
Live facial recognition is pervasive in China, where it’s used for authoritarian law enforcement, public shaming and racial profiling. In the UK, it’s being used for everyday policing and it’s being rolled out very gradually. When recently explaining the plans, Sir Sadiq said “what we do not do is a big bang” with the cameras because “it would be a disaster”.
Quite right. So the frog is being slowly boiled, but the goal is now clear – live facial recognition is becoming a permanent fixture on our gargantuan CCTV network.
The sinister expansion of AI mass surveillance is happening at the same time as the total breakdown of our criminal justice system. That breakdown will soon culminate in the early release of 5,000 prisoners into the community. And so it seems Britain is being turned into an open prison.
That might sound extreme but that’s only because this transformation of our country genuinely is extreme. The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, talks of “virtual prisons”, managing offenders in the community rather than prisons using tech and GPS tagging. She even said her “ultimate dream” was to turn Britain into a “Panopticon” using live facial recognition, alongside other forms of AI and technology – so that “the eyes of the state can be on you at all times”.
The replacement of the law of the land with the eyes of the state encapsulates Britain’s current transformation. The people on facial recognition watchlists are generally well known to the police – that’s how their photos get on there. They may be subject to court orders, civil orders or bail conditions – and “vulnerable people” as well as victims of crime can be added to watchlists too. The majority of people on the watchlists are not wanted for arrest, but people the police want to check on.
It is a horrifying vision of policing for the future – and absolutely galling for politicians and police lazily to cite “tackling violence against women and girls” as a justification for this mass surveillance in the same week as the sentencing of Simon Levy. Levy was so disastrously “managed in the community” that he was able to sexually assault at least 10 women on the London Underground, violently rape several women and murder two women.
Clearly, the problem isn’t that police can’t find offenders – it’s that they don’t know what to do with them. Experts say his case is the tip of the iceberg.
People might feel differently about live facial recognition if police reserved it for the most serious cases – such as hunting for fugitives, or searching for a suspect in the wake of a terror attack. But to integrate it into everyday policing, especially at a place like Oxford Circus where muggings, shoplifting and assaults take place in broad daylight and police rarely do much about it, smacks of a show-pony policy that distracts from the total breakdown of policing in the capital.
Throwing open the prison doors and then hoping people known to police walk past facial recognition cameras is fully automated incompetence. It is the unravelling of the social contract, the collapse of the rule of law and the demise of liberty that citizens of a free country are supposed to be able to enjoy safely.
Live facial recognition cameras will keep us no safer. They discourage police from proactively policing, from putting officers on the streets, or from proactively seeking criminals at their homes and workplaces. Instead, they result in police officers glued to tablets, waiting for an algorithm to flag someone of interest on the street.
And who among us really trusts police with such an extraordinary mass surveillance tool? The Metropolitan Police, we recently learnt, spent four months investigating a journalist for sending questions to former Cambridge professor Jason Arday about allegations of plagiarism. The force tasked five of its armed police officers to arrest a comedian for posts on X about trans issues. It is a force that arrests around 1,500 people a year for speech offences.
This slow replacement of targeted policing with a digital catch net not only makes us less safe. It makes us less free. In a country covered with live facial-recognition cameras, we become a nation of suspects constantly walking through a digital identity parade. The presumption of innocence that underpins British liberty is becoming a forgotten relic.
As the prison walls are coming down, so is the wall between innocent and criminal – the liberties that we’re all supposed to enjoy are being stripped from us under the banner of “safety”. When millions of innocent people start having to pay the price for the criminal few, the fabric of our liberty is lost.
– Silkie Carlo
Telegraph – Sadiq Khan is joyfully expanding our surveillance state