Live Facial Recognition technology was utilised for the first time in Essex in Southend High Street on Tuesday (24 October) and Chelmsford High Street the following day (Wednesday 25 October), with the support of South Wales Police which owns the equipment.
The deployment was targeted to focus on a specific list of people wanted in connection with high harm offences, such as violent or sexual offences.
So we’ve got the CCTV cameras on the van that is borrowed by the facial rec software. It’ll mask over each individual’s face that walks through the camera screen. Anyone who matches will alert. There’ll be a siren, and it’ll tell us their name, date of birth, who they are, what they’re wanted for, and the URN of the crime. If you’re not on the watch list, it will just show up as an unknown face and within a fraction of a second, it’s forgotten you. It doesn’t keep any information of anyone who isn’t on that watch list. That is all standalone. And it’s not accessible via the Internet. It is just on that computer. So while we’ve been here with Essex, we’ve primarily focused on violent offenders, whereas back in South Wales, we’ll use priority suspects for the violent and high priority crimes. We will use low priority as well. We’ll have missing persons people wanted on warrant. Counter-Terrorism, sexual offenders so that, you know, ours is far broader. But in Southend we had more positive hits than we would typically back at home. We had one who was arrested for a robbery and a theft, and there was a further one which was for sexual offences. and the way it’s worked at the minute if we get an alert we’ll typically get quite excited that it has alerted and we’ll go and find the individual because we’ve seen the image and we know where they are. And then our Essex colleagues will come in and they will be able to check the person’s details, make sure it is the right person and the way to go.