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The front line in facial recognition. Police cameras in an East London street, everyone gets scanned if you refuse, here's what can happen.

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This man didn't want to be caught by the police cameras, so he covered his face. Police stopped him. They photographed him anyway. An argument followed.

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What’s your suspicion?

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The fact that he walked passed clearly marked facial recognition thing and covered his face

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I would do the same.

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I would

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do the same.

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It gives us grounds to stop him and verify. No, it doesn't.

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The police said this was disorderly behaviour, so they gave him a fine.

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The chap told me that about. He said he got facial recognition. So I walked past like that. It's a cold day as well. As I've done that the police officers asked me to come in, so I've got me back up. I said to him [] off basically. I said I don’t want me face on anything. If I’m going to cover me face I’m going to cover me face

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Speaker 2
It’s certainly not up to them to tell me not to cover me face. I've got a £90 fine. Here you go. Look at that. Thanks lads. £90. Well done.

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He was caught up in the last of ten trials carried out by the Metropolitan Police. The Met have had successes. There were three arrests from facial recognition on this test day alone. But the trials have proved controversial. Opponents claim they’re taking place in a legal vacuum.

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There is nothing in UK law that has the words facial recognition. There is no legal basis for the police to be using facial recognition. There are no legal limitations on how they can use it. No policy. No regulation. This is a free for all. We don't know who's on the watch list. We didn't know how long the images were going to be stored for.

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And the police kind of making up the rules as they go along. My ultimate fear is that we would have live facial recognition capabilities on a gargantuan CCTV network, which is about 6 million cameras in the UK. If that happens, the nature of life in this country would change. It would mean that everywhere we go we could be identified, tracked, that we would be leaving a location data trail, that your face could be searched and the detailed record of your movements gained.

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Police argue that in a time when every smartphone camera has facial recognition, why should they be left behind?

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I believe, as does the commissioner and the Management Board of the Met believe not trialling such technology will be neglectful. Actually, we ought to explore all technology to see how it can keep people safer, how it can make policing more effective. However, we are completely aware of some of the concerns raised and what we do with these trials is that to try to understand those better so we can actually protect human rights, but also keep people safe

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at the same time. We're reviewing all capabilities in terms of live facial recognition and absolutely, the technology is there. For body worn or smaller devices to be fitted with facial recognition technology as is CCTV. So absolutely, we will look at that. But again, the right safeguards and the right reviews and learning has to be put around those.