Western Australia Police scanned 1.38 million faces in trial — The Guardian

Western Australia Police have completed a five-month trial of a facial recognition system in public places. During that time, cameras scanned 1,380,882 faces across 100 deployments at 43 locations in regional and urban areas of the state. As The Guardian reports, system alerts contributed to 122 arrests, as well as police contacts with 146 registered sex offenders.

Trial results

According to police, the alerts also helped locate ten people for welfare checks. Cameras were mounted on or near marked police vehicles, and faces in designated public areas were matched against a list of people from police databases.

The technology was used three times during the Perth Royal Show. There, 223,749 faces were scanned, the system generated 15 alerts, followed by three arrests and seven contacts with registered sex offenders.

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False matches and concerns

A police representative confirmed that throughout the testing period, the system incorrectly identified people nine times. Police assessed this as 0.00065% of the total number of scans. Western Australia Police Commissioner Col Blanch said that none of the people subject to false alerts were arrested, although law enforcement officers spoke with each of them.

At the same time, Civil Liberties Australia executive director Bill Rowlings criticised the method used to calculate the error rate. In his view, the correctness of the system's operation should also be assessed based on how many of the 122 arrests result in convictions.

Under the trial rules, images of people who were not on the list for checking were to be pixelated in real time and immediately deleted without being stored. The Office of the Information Commissioner of Western Australia, an independent privacy oversight body, had previously warned of potential collective harm to privacy. Police vehicles with cameras have already been removed from public places while the department conducts an internal assessment of the technology's operation, its impact on communities, and compliance with the established safeguards.