Report Summary
The Chair of the Scottish Police Authority launched a national conversation on the potential use of Live Facial Recognition (LFR) in Scotland in June 2024. This paper aims to provide a summary of the available information on the use of LFR in a policing context.
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Human Rights and Ethical Considerations - Efficacy and Accuracy
Efficacy and Accuracy
A review of LFR usage by Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) found that between January and June 2024, 500 hours of surveillance footage was captured. Further analysis of the 79 deployments conducted in this timeframe found that police stopped one person every 55 minutes, with an arrest every 128 minutes. The review, conducted by Stopwatch, concluded that there was limited evidence of the efficacy of LFR.
Big Brother Watch has published findings raising concerns around the accuracy of LFR. Published in 2018, this report found that the use of LFR by MPS has a 98% accuracy rate, and that South Wales Police (SWP) LFR has a 91% accuracy rate. However, the Biometrics Institute concluded that there was insufficient data in this report to assess the accuracy of LFR.
In addition, it should be noted that the quality of images in watchlists may impact LFR’s accuracy. This may be counteracted by the existence of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Accreditation (ISO/IEC 19794-5) which details the standards of images that should be used in a watchlist database. Whilst this standard exists for the quality of images, there is no specific ISO accreditation for the overall standard of LFR technology, which requires the need for human decision-making on its outputs.
Police Scotland will require to ensure that images taken in custody or obtained from other sources such as CCTV, are of sufficient quality to maximise the effectiveness of any future technologies adopted.
Differing technologies have varying standards and thresholds for quality, and Police Scotland are already reviewing and improving the resolution of images captured in custody to ensure future compliance.
Bespoke weeding policies would be applied in line with relevant policy and legalisation to ensure regulatory compliance. This may be monitored through periodic review and reconciliation exercises with national databases which will also ensure data is accurate and available for searching.
