The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) has been slammed by civil society for advising local police forces to hide information from the public about having used banned facial recognition tool.
Jake Hurfurt, the head of research and investigations at civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, said pressing police forces to withhold data is “the practice of an authoritarian censor not an accountable public body”.
“It is alarming that the NPCC is going beyond giving advice to individual forces and instead seemingly orchestrating how every force responds to sensitive transparency requests,” he added.