Sharing suspects’ ethnicity won’t stop all instances of disinformation, says minister – UK politics live | Politics

In an interview this morning, the policing minister, Diana Johnson, said she had seen facial recognition technology in action in Croydon, London, where the Metropolitan police had put together a watchlist of wanted individuals, and the list was deleted after the exercise. “So it was very tailored,” Johnson told BBC Breakfast.

She added:

There are laws about how this has to be done in terms of human rights, equalities law, data protection laws.

I think one of the concerns people, perhaps rightly, have is the need to consolidate that into one piece of legislation or one law, and that’s something we’re going to consult on later in the year, about how live facial recognition technology should be used and the oversight of it to make it as transparent as possible for the public to really feel this is something that the police are using properly.

Johnson had earlier told Times Radio:

There is quite a lot of misinformation out there about what this actually does and how it’s used.

She said:

And I know in the past, there’ve been concerns about bias, particularly around certain ethnic groups or genders or age. And the way that this is now structured, the algorithms that are being used have been independently tested, so I’m confident that the live facial recognition that we’re rolling out today actually is within the law and does not have the bias that has happened previously.

According to the Home Office, the technology will be used to track down high-harm offenders. Seven English forces will have access to 10 vans equipped with cameras, across Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Bedfordshire, Surrey, Sussex, Thames Valley and Hampshire, following on from recent deployments by London’s Met police and South Wales police, reports the PA news agency.

Ch Supt Tim Morgan of South Wales police said the technology had “never resulted in a wrongful arrest in south Wales, and there have been no false alerts for several years as the technology and our understanding has evolved”.

But human rights campaigners have “concerns” about “this incredibly intrusive technology”, Shami Chakrabarti, a former director of the civil liberties advocacy group Liberty, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

The former shadow attorney general said:

Some would say this is yet another move towards a total surveillance society – challenges to privacy, challenges to freedom of assembly and association, and problems with race and sex discrimination because of the higher likelihood of false matches in the context of certain groups.

She said that “the public generally understand that police powers are governed by statute, so there’s a public conversation, there are parliamentary debates and votes”, but warned there was no law specifically covering live facial recognition to gather evidence. “It’s particularly odd that this has all been developed pretty much completely outside the law,” she said.

Chakrabarti said she “welcomed” plans to consult ahead of possible new legislation, but warned that to date, “it’s been a bit of a wild west – the police procuring technology from whichever companies they see fit, the police drawing up watchlists of who they’re looking for and what level, what severity of crime should be sufficient for deployment, and pretty much marking their own homework”.