INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
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Privacy concerns feel "much, much smaller" than worrying about "a knife through
the chest", says Dame Cressida
London's police chief has defended the use of facial recognition technology, labelling
critics "ill-informed".Dame Cressida Dick said eight criminals had been caught using the controversial live facial recognition cameras.She
said "inaccurate" critics should "justify to the victims of those crimes why police should not be allowed to use tech to catch
criminals".Privacy campaigners say the systems flag up innocent people as wanted suspects.The Metropolitan Police Commissioner was
responding to a report calling for tighter rules on police use of technology.The report, from the Royal United Services Institute, looked at
the use of data and algorithms by police in England and Wales
Among its recommendations were that police should issue new national guidelines in this area.But Dame Cressida used her speech at the
report's launch to issue a strong defence of the use of data analytics by her officers - including the controversial deployment of facial
recognition cameras.The roaming cameras, set up in areas of London for hours at a time, scan people's faces and compare them to a list of
But an independent review showed that most matches are false alarms - 19% were accurate
"If an algorithm can help identify, in our criminal intelligence systems material, a potential serial rapist or killer then I think almost
objecting to being filmed by police"The only people who benefit from us not using [it] lawfully and proportionately are the criminals, the
rapists, the terrorists and all those who want to harm you, your family and friends."The Met says its tests show cameras can identify 70% of
suspects who walk past them.But privacy campaigner Big Brother Watch says it is "a highly controversial mass surveillance tool with an
unprecedented failure rate [of] 93%".Even a technically brilliant test will mainly give false alarms for rare things - like being on a
This is because it has so many more opportunities to generate false alerts.Say you're looking to identify the players at the FA Cup Final,
based solely on these facial recognition cameras, and you scan the entire stadium for them.A test that correctly identifies 70% of targets
should flag about 15 of the 22 players.But since it's being tested on a 90,000 capacity crowd as well, if it generates a false alert for
one in 1,000 people - you'll get 90 false matches.So only 15 of the 105 matches would be verifiably correct.False alarms don't mean "bin the
test", they mean "don't treat every 'match' like a criminal"
"It is purely magical thinking to suggest facial recognition can solve London's problem with knife crime," said Silkie Carlo, director of
"The Commissioner is right that the loudest voices in this debate are the critics, it's just that she's not willing to listen to them,"
she said.But Dame Cressida argued privacy concerns were overblown."In an age of Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, concern about my image
and that of my fellow law-abiding citizens passing through [facial recognition] and not being stored, feels much, much smaller than my and
the public's vital expectation to be kept safe from a knife through the chest," she said.
