How to measure success in biometric security?

By Professor Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner

How do you measure the success of your biometric security system? As more high street traders consider biometric solutions like facial recognition technology (FRT) it’s an important question. The UK government remains very supportive of FRT in tackling crime areas with shocking statistics like shoplifting, but some see the technology as simply a faster reporting tool to alert the police. So, what does a good day for in-store biometrics look like?

With reported results reducing crime by up to 70%, the preventative power of biometrics is now proving itself daily and UK retailers are seeing immediate and sustained benefits from their investment in FRT. Prevention seems to be the best measure of effectiveness but if we’re unsure we should ask. Ask shop workers who have been abused, harassed, spat at and assaulted; ask shoppers and passers-by who’ve watched perpetrators chased and wrestled to the floor with all the accompanying soundtrack and alarm; ask any of those who have been called to give evidence in the subsequent trial – ask them all if they’d rather it hadn’t happened in the first place. A few might have enjoyed sharing videos of the street theatre from a distance, but most will be keen to avoid it a second time.

Also ask HR teams, comms, press and media. Ask shareholders. Do you want to be known as the supermarket with the highest arrest rate or the lowest crime rate? Ask the lawyers and insurers too. Retailers have a duty of care to their staff and customers, to provide them with a safe and secure environment. Think of rampant retail crime as a health and safety issue and you will see the flaws in only using biometrics once the harm has already happened.

From a retailer’s perspective, prevention looks infinitely better than cure – and a good day surely means the absence of incidents.

Now ask the police. What’s the best measure of their effectiveness? The answer is the same. It’s the absence of crime and disorder and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them. That’s not my opinion, that’s one of the founding principles of modern British policing, and its architect Sir Robert Peel. While response times, arrest and charge rates are all important measures of activity, effective policing means fitting a service of finite resources to infinite demand. The absence of crime and disorder has been the strategic metric for policing effectiveness for the past 150 years.

From both perspectives – retailer and police – which is the better measure of biometrics success: shops sending the police images of 2000 attacks on their staff every day or using the same technology to prevent people doing it?

The potential for biometric security systems in combatting retail crime is revolutionary, reducing incidents and thereby the need for a police response. Installing facial recognition to report suspects is like using Taser as a truncheon – a crude underutilisation of technology to achieve a suboptimal policing outcome. Using AI-enabled biometrics for police reporting is a measure of inefficiency.

It’s unlikely that Peel (who give his name to the police moniker of “Bobbies”) came up with them himself, but his nine principles are still sacrosanct in many countries. Some of them might raise an eyebrow in today’s biometric world. For example, Principle #2 says the police should demonstrate impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy when policy is central to the lawfulness of biometric systems such as FRT. Other Peelian principles remain very relevant in the current debates about biometric technology and policing. Like this one: “to recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour.” Do the public want their over-burdened police arresting half-a-million shoplifters a year?

And there’s another policing consideration here. Biometrically turbocharging part of the system will only work if the rest can keep up. Here’s an example. Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police Service are developing Rapid DNA analysis to speed up the time it takes to create a usable profile from a suspect’s sample. It’s impressive stuff. When I visited their forensic laboratory I gave a mouth swab to see if the police scientists really could derive my DNA profile – something that generally takes a week – in a matter of hours. They did it in under two, which means it could be done while a suspect is still in custody rather than having to be released on bail while the results are obtained. However, as the police themselves reminded me, all parts of criminal justice process must accelerate to the same degree for it to make a positive difference.

There’s a great lesson here for any retailers and police forces thinking of using FRT as a clever reporting tool. There’s no point putting in a biometric Bat phone if it goes straight to voicemail.

Investigation, prosecution and loss recovery are all valid routes for tackling retail crime and criminality and biometrics can help there too – but they all bring attrition, cost and a general feeling of clearing up after something bad has happened. Using FRT in shops shouldn’t be seen as putting in a smarter CCTV camera; it’s more about regaining control of private space to “prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression and severity of legal punishment” (Peel’s first principle). That’s the real challenge of retail crime and, in that context, the potential offered by biometric technology to help the police is unsurpassed.

Retail crime is ballooning while police resources are gasping. Installing a fatter, faster reporting pipeline without a fatter, faster response? That’s not innovation, that’s constipation. How is that a measure of biometric success?

About the author

Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner, is Professor of Governance and National Security at CENTRIC (Centre for Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence & Organised Crime Research) and a non-executive director at Facewatch.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  criminal ID  |  facial recognition  |  Fraser Sampson  |  law enforcement  |  retail biometrics