Facial recognition for Essex police rolls out in a heavily surveilled environment

The adoption of biometrics and facial recognition technology by law enforcement bodies in the UK and U.S. has progressed to a point at which the cultural and political differences between the two countries are beginning to shape policy and public opinion. While U.S. police forces face pushback from civil liberties groups, UK police are posting success stories about collaborations with providers such as Corsight AI, and operating in the context of a citizenry that is generally more tolerant of mass surveillance – or at least more willing to look at both sides of the proverbial coin.

Essex Police arrest five after tech triggers alerts in Clacton, Southend

Police in Essex, England have used Corsight AI’s live facial intelligence tools to make several recent arrests. A release from the company says three people were arrested at the Clacton Airshow on August 22 and two more were nabbed in Southend on August 25 and 26, including for sexual assault and common assault cases. Per a release from the police force, for the Clacton Airshow deployment, “there were five positive alerts leading to three arrests.”

“In Southend, there were also five positive alerts which resulted in two arrests – one for harassment and one for sexual assault.”

Corsight AI’s system monitors for known offenders, people on watchlists and “protected vulnerable individuals at risk of harm.” It says images of anyone who does not trigger a match are deleted “almost instantly,” ensuring no data retention or storage.

The facial intelligence system has been created in collaboration with Digital Barriers, which provides edge-based video surveillance services, including real-time facial recognition from security cameras, vehicle-mounted cameras and body cameras. The company has deployed live cellular video monitoring services for military operations in Afghanistan, royal and presidential events, and the Olympics.

Assistant Chief Constable Andy Pritchard calls Essex Police “an innovative and forward-thinking force, utilizing new technology to keep people safe and deter crime.”

“Our live facial recognition technology is used to locate people we want to speak to in connection with ongoing investigations and to manage people with court orders or conditions. Criminals cannot think they can walk around our communities without being caught.”

Rob Watts, President of Corsight AI, says “it is a privilege for Corsight AI to contribute to the safety and security of the law-abiding people of Essex.”

Therein, perhaps, lies the key to FRT integration into policing in the UK: the British mindset (usually) prefers order to chaos and rules over revolutions. After all, if you are in London, you are on camera, namely one of the CCTV cameras in the city, of which there are somewhere between 625,000 and 950,000, depending on estimates – about one for every ten to fourteen people who live there.

In a recent column for Biometric Update, former UK Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner Fraser Sampson argues that “it is societal expectation that will ultimately determine democratic accountability for the technology available to the police being used or eschewed, not least because the UK still has a model of policing based on consent.”

“We, the people, are now using sophisticated surveillance tools once the preserve of state intelligence agencies, routinely and at minimal financial cost,” he writes. “We freely share personal datasets – including our facial images – with private companies and government on our smart devices for access control, identity verification and threat mitigation. From this societal vantage point it seems reasonable for the police to infer that many citizens not only support them using new remote biometric technology but also expect them to do so, to protect communities, prevent serious harm and detect dangerous offenders.”

U.S. prizes freedom from surveillance over increased security

“We, the people,” however, evokes something different across the pond. Distrust of police use of facial recognition is rooted in the country’s history of segregation and racism against Black people. Current statistics do not help the problem, in that all but one of the seven people arrested across the U.S. due to false facial recognition matches to date are Black.

But beyond that, the constitutional passions of the U.S. are rooted in specific ideas about personal freedoms, independence and individualism. Commenting on Corsight AI’s deployment of facial recognition for security at the massive Mall of America in Minnesota, the state’s ACLU urges people to “remember that in order to catch the ‘bad guys’ with facial rec you need to surveil everyone.” In America, this is a harder pill to swallow than in the UK, where the pervasive advice is to keep calm and carry on, no matter how many eyes are watching.

There have, of course, been pushbacks there, too, notably as the government announces more facial recognition deployments in the wake of violent far-right riots in the north. But they seem less likely to rile up a UK population for whom mass surveillance by the government is already a fact of daily life.

Article Topics

biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  Corsight  |  criminal ID  |  Digital Barriers  |  Essex Police  |  facial recognition  |  police  |  real-time biometrics  |  UK