Live facial recognition helps police nab sex offenders: Scottish biometrics commissioner

Live facial recognition (LFR) for police: aye or nae? Opinions in Scotland differ, as Police Scotland considers deploying the biometric tech to identify individuals on watchlists. A police survey of nearly 2,700 people found that 49 per cent of respondents were ‘very’ or ‘somewhat comfortable’ with the force’s potential use of LFR – and 48 per cent were ‘somewhat’ or ‘very uncomfortable’ with the same.

On the one hand are by-now standard privacy and overreach concerns about live facial recognition. The capability for law enforcement to carry out mass surveillance increases its chances of doing so – notably in a political climate that has shown western democratic values to be easily discarded by those in charge. The OECD.AI Policy Observatory has formally labeled the issue as a “hazard,” saying “its use would plausibly lead to violations of privacy, potential civil rights breaches, and misidentification harms (false positives/negatives).”

On the other hand, the Scottish Biometrics Commissioner has published a statement that sets out his reasons for supporting “the future use of live facial recognition by Police Scotland primarily to protect women, girls, and children from male violence and additionally for other proportionate law enforcement purposes.”

Commissioner Dr. Brian Plastow bases his argument primarily on numbers, noting the percentage of arrests from live facial recognition that were sex offenders or rapists. “In highlighting the number of sex offenders arrested as a percentage of all arrests (9.5 percent) during LFR deployments, my attention was drawn to the protective value of LFR as a strategic policing response to the scourge of male violence in the UK against women, girls and children.”

In effect, he says, Scotland has a big problem with men committing violence against women and kids. “Around 80 percent of persons who offend in Scotland are male with 81 percent of domestic abuse incidents having a female victim and a male offender. Scotland also has more than seven thousand registered sex offenders.”

So: if a significant percentage of arrests resulting from live facial recognition are catching sexual offenders, it’s worth using, because of the scale of the problem. Plastow notes that Scottish law “places a duty on all constables of Police Scotland to prevent and detect crime, to maintain order and to protect life and property” – and that “the affirmative duty to protect life in Scotland extends to all citizens in Scotland including potential future victims of crime and not just those already harmed, injured, or killed because of criminal actions.”

However, he also wags a finger at “public discourse of those preoccupied with notions of the ‘surveillance state’ and ‘dangerously authoritarian police surveillance.’” His argument, citing the Human Rights Act (HRA), hinges on trust that law enforcement will themselves obey the law.

That said, Plastow has expressed doubts about the quality of police custody images for the purpose of effective face biometrics matching, and generally pushed against what he considers government overreach. And he notes that “any future decision by Police Scotland to adopt LFR would necessitate a significant programme of work including to address issues of custody image quality and to develop policy, processes, and governance arrangements and to procure an ICT solution with transparent algorithms addressing accuracy rates and bias.”

In other words, live facial recognition for police is not a bad idea – if it’s done right, and within the law.

Article Topics

biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  criminal ID  |  facial recognition  |  real-time biometrics  |  Scotland  |  Scottish Biometrics Commissioner