UK Police Defends Face Recognition Technology.
UK Police Defends Face Recognition – South Wales Police (SWP) in the UK said it was generating 140 matches a month with facial recognition technology.
In an interview reported by Police Oracle, SWP chief constable, Jeremy Vaughan, told the Welsh Affairs Committee face recognition technology is only used for serious offenses.
Vaughan said by using facial technology after the event, SWP has caught sex offenders on buses, trains, and outside schools.
According to Vaughan, images from sources like CCTV, mobile phones, and social media, are compared against a database of 600,000 images held by the SWP and the Welsh Gwent police force.
Vaughan said there is “a clear escalation/authorization process for who’s on the watch list” and personal data is not retained.
UK Police Defends Face Recognition
Face recognition technology is controversial in the UK due to accusations of racial bias. Though a third-party report found that there was no evidence of significant bias by the technology – false positives of 3 in 10,000 compared to false positives of 1 in 10,000 – criticism continues.
“We’re duty bound to use whatever technology we can — within the law — to protect the public and I include facial recognition in that,” Vaughan said.
Vaughan recommended introduction of an internal Code of Practice in law enforcement to stop the tech from being misused. Of note, NIST found racial bias introduced by skewed learning databases has been significantly reduced in the most recent generations of face recognition technology.
You can find out more about face recognition technology performance from NIST here or read more SEN news here.
“UK Police Defends Face Recognition Technology.”
