By Professor Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner
Live facial recognition (LFR) and other transformative technologies are at the heart of a new white paper on policing reform in the UK.
In a document published on 27 January the government is promising radical reform to the way that UK policing is organised “so that it is set up to succeed in a rapidly changing world”. Nowhere is that world changing more rapidly than technology and, from a biometrics perspective, the white paper is very encouraging. Forensic biometrics are being reconfigured and LFR was singled out for star billing in the Home Office announcement even as lawyers in the high court were getting to their feet on the other side of town to present their opening arguments against its use by the Metropolitan Police Service.
A bespoke legal framework to enable safer, more efficient and consistent use of similar “transformative technologies” is promised and long overdue. Under the sweeping reforms, facial recognition technology will be more widely used by the police and receive increased national investment, rather than leaving a couple of pathfinder forces to shoulder the burden and backlash. If the potential of this and other biometric capabilities is to be harnessed by the police and trusted by the public, such a framework is precisely what’s needed.
The further promise to work more closely with retailers will be welcomed by high street stores investing in transformative biometric technologies like facial recognition that are returning significant and sustained results, preventing attacks on staff and stopping burgeoning theft. However, the technology needs to be used to its best effect, empowering shopkeepers to take back control of their commercial space and shouldn’t be seen as just a smart reporting tool to tell the police who robbed them and relabelling their offending.
Pioneering biometrics have transformed the criminal justice process for over a century but local capabilities have varied widely. Against that backdrop, a proposed national consolidation of forensic science capabilities and expertise will bring consistent and comprehensive coverage, and the new national forensics service will include much needed cyber expertise as well as DNA and fingerprint specialisms. Whether this is achieved at the expense of those forces that I found to be doing it very effectively locally, regionally (and, for the Metropolitan Police, nationally), only time – and results – will tell.
Introducing a new National Centre for AI in Policing (Police.AI), the government is committing £115 million over the next 3 years to Artificial Intelligence to create “a platform for identifying, testing and then scaling AI technology” – it’s a modest figure but the ambition is right and the new technology centre will begin work in a matter of weeks which is impressive. Less immediate will be the new regulatory framework bringing “strong oversight and accountability”. This will be informed by public consultation and any serious ‘modernising’ of the relevant legislation must take account of the research evidence showing conditional public support tempered by widespread concern. It must reflect the fact that AI-enabled surveillance isn’t cameras-on-sticks anymore. A modern regulatory framework must address the realities of biometrically equipped doorbells, dash cams and drones and a conspicuous regulator that engages and enables.
To be relevant, let alone effective, any new framework must also recognise how the police increasingly ask for – and receive – data feeds from the public after any incident and take account of the new surveillance relationship between citizen and state underpinning this reality. The paper’s characterisation of the police as approachable community partners rather than solely law enforcers is a more accurate description of the model of policing by consent and the symbiotic relationship for sharing community surveillance data depends on it being true.
As for geography, it has long been clear that England and Wales can’t afford the narcissism of small differences inherent in the current ‘landscape’ of 43 geographic police forces. In key strategic areas like national security and civil contingency preparedness, the existing configuration is the solution to the wrong problem: the world and its citizens – criminal and law-abiding alike – have moved on. Policing has a lot of catching up to do and technology will help close the gap.
Elected police and crime commissioners were supposed to close a perceived democratic gap between the police and policed but we weren’t ready for a sheriff and now the great British compromise has been run out of town. Whether handing police oversight back to local government where it began in 1835 will make the difference that’s needed remains to be seen, but the new “Policing and Crime Boards” sound like the paint crews should be stocking up on Municipal Grey.
We are, however, to get our own FBI in the form of a National Police Service to provide strategic leadership and direction of national priorities, set stronger standards for a more consistent service to the public, provide local policing with better enabling and support services and a platform for developing new technologies. My fellow commissioners and I have documented the need for these changes within biometrics and surveillance in various reports to parliament and a surprising omission from the government’s reforms is vehicle identification. If anything in policing needs transformative technology it’s the vehicle registration plate system. Policing and law enforcement need to be able to identify vehicles reliably and remotely: at the moment they can’t. Vehicle ID is crying out for the same four things that the National Police Service is being formed to deliver and a new national police body would have been the ideal place to put digital vehicle ID credentials on a statutory footing.
Inevitably, the white paper wanders into the swamps of performance frameworks and protocols. We’ve been here before (who hasn’t?) and each new one was intended to cure the same things as the failing one. Torching bureaucracy has been a placard slogan of successive police reforms for over a century. Form filling’s a pain but try challenging an undocumented decision or unmeasured performance. Technological accountability needs accurate, auditable records.
In all, the proposed reforms are good news for the police and better news for the citizen. While the votive rhetoric will sound familiar to police leaders, policing needs technological transformation and there are some encouraging and even exciting features in the proposals which should generate confidence and encourage investment.
About the author
Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner, is Professor of Governance and National Security at CENTRIC (Centre for Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence & Organised Crime Research) and a non-executive director at Facewatch.
Article Topics
biometric identification | biometrics | facial recognition | Fraser Sampson | law enforcement | live facial recognition | London Metropolitan Police | real-time biometrics | UK