Gregory Campbell calls for facial recognition safeguards to ensure police don’t infringe liberties of innocent people
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The DUP MP was speaking during a discussion of facial recognition technology at Westminster.
Such software is not currently used by the PSNI but it is deployed by several police forces in Britain.
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Hide Ad“Does my hon. Friend agree that our concern for the wider population and individual safety has to be paramount?


"Allied with that are the necessary safeguards that have to be built in so that safety does not rule out and infringe on the personal liberties of people who have not done anything wrong and are unlikely to do so,” said the East Derry MP.
His colleague Jim Shannon said: “Safety is paramount—that is the critical reason for using the technology. I speak on human rights issues all the time, as many present will know.
"I want to make sure that when we have technology in place, human rights are not abused or disenfranchised, and that people do not feel threatened.
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Hide Ad"Innocent people should never feel threatened, of course, but there are those who have concerns. The technology has already proven itself and led to a number of arrests of people wanted for serious offences such as sexual abuse, domestic violence, aggravated burglary and shoplifting.”
Although the PSNI says it does not currently use the technology it has established a facial recognition project and the first board meeting took place in October 2022.
“This project is in discovery phase and there are no plans at present to trial, introduce or test any kind of facial recognition within PSNI,” the PSNI stated two years ago.
During the debate Conservative MP John Whittingdale said he recently accompanied police officers on a deployment in Chelmsford High Street in Essex and they told him they had ‘a watch list of 639 individuals who had been approved by the superintendent and were wanted for questioning in relation to offences such as violence against the person’.
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Hide Ad“In the course of the 30 minutes or so that I spent with those officers, they recorded 1,500 faces of people who passed by. The officers assured me that those images were matched against the watch list to see whether they registered a positive, and if they did not they were deleted in less than half a second.
"During the time I was there, there were approximately 10 positives, which led to a conversation: a police officer would go and have a polite exchange to find out why the person had registered positive, and they were checked against the Police National Computer or Athena. That morning, that led to two arrests,” said the Maldon MP.
He said the Chief Constable of Essex had written to him and colleagues ‘to emphasise the effectiveness of the technology and its importance to that force. He told me that they had so far had 25 deployments across Essex, resulting in 26 arrests and 26 other positive disposals’.