Responding to the heinous stabbing during a live facial recognition deployment in Croydon, Mark Johnson, Advocacy Manager at Big Brother Watch said:
“This heinous stabbing during a live facial recognition deployment demonstrates that this mass surveillance tech is wholly ineffective in fighting crime. Whilst officers were stood around cameras waiting for criminals to come to them, this stabbing took place just meters away down the street whilst the suspect fled the scene.
“Members of the public will rightly ask whether this stabbing would have happened had the police officers been fulfilling their traditional role of actively patrolling the area rather than standing by cameras. The Met has serious questions to answer about this.
“Whilst the officers at the scene should be commended for halting the facial recognition deployment and acting as the first responders, this episode shows that the Met’s priorities are all wrong when it comes to policing in our communities. Rather than focusing on the fundamentals, they continue to pursue the use of ineffective technology which treats all members of the public as suspects, subjecting thousands of innocent people to intrusive surveillance.
“This year, the EU passed a law to ban police using live facial recognition in most circumstances. This serious incident, let alone the cases of innocent people being misidentified, should show the Government that live facial recognition is not only a threat to rights and justice but an extremely unhelpful distraction in British policing, and should urgently be subject to an EU-style ban.”