Responding to the riots across England over the past week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer says he’s backing a wider rollout of facial recognition technology to track and prevent “thugs” from traveling to areas where they plan to cause unrest.
Following the abhorrent stabbings of multiple children at a Taylor Swift-themed summer holiday club, violence broke out in Southport, the location of the attack, and in other towns and cities across the UK.
They also come at a fractious time between the public and police, mere weeks after similar riots broke out in Harehills, Leeds, following police intervention regarding a child protection matter.
The riots in Southport and elsewhere in the country are believed to be fueled by those exercising far-right hatred, given the nature of the incidents in which mosques have been attacked for no reason. The violence, which continued over the weekend, is understood to be driven by false claims spread online that the perpetrator was an asylum seeker called “Ali al-Shakati” who had arrived in the UK on a boat last year. Welsh-born suspect Axel Rudakubana, 17, who is currently in custody and has been charged with murdering the three girls, was named last week despite being underage in a vain effort to stop the spread of misinformation.
At the weekend, a Merseyside library was set on fire and the rioters tried to stop firefighters from putting it out, local police said.
Starmer said last week he would be establishing a new national capability to tackle these violent riots with facial recognition technology at the heart.
Now, we trust our readers to be tech-literate enough to know that this was always going to be an intensely controversial announcement, especially for a former human rights lawyer.
But, for those who aren’t quite as clued up on the latest movements in this area, earlier this year, the House of Lords’ Justice and Home Affairs Committee told the former Conservative government that live facial recognition technology (LFR) lacked a legal basis.
That is to say, there is an absence of public trust in the how the technology is used – we couldn’t imagine why – and existing regulations aren’t fit for purpose. There is no adequate oversight of LFR in UK law, which has led to “deep concerns” with existing plans to roll out the technology.
But who says we should let reason get in the way of a bad idea? The former UK policing minister called for LFR use to be doubled just less than a year ago, despite the myriad issues plaguing it, including a widely documented racial bias.
Starmer said the wider deployment will build on the lessons learned from the UK’s Football Policing Unit, which uses LFR to slide-tackle football hooligans traveling across the country every weekend to ram, batter, spit, and punch their way around sporting events for whatever reason.
“I can announce today that following this meeting we will establish a national capability across police forces to tackle violent disorder,” the Prime Minister said. “These thugs are mobile, they move from community to community, and we must have a policing response that can do the same.
“Shared intelligence, wider deployment of facial recognition technology, and preventive action – criminal behavior orders to restrict their movements before they can even board a train, in just the same way we do with football hooligans.”
The newly appointed PM also threw a jab at the social media companies he believes play a material role in helping stoke riots and unrest.
“And let me also say to large social media companies and those who run them: Violent disorder clearly whipped up online – that is also a crime.
“It’s happening on your premises and the law must be upheld everywhere. That is the single most important duty of government. Service rests on security, and we will take all necessary action to keep our streets safe.”
Privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch has been quick out of the gate with criticism of the PM’s proposals, saying LFR doesn’t combat the core issues at heart of the recent riots.
“The Prime Minister’s alarming pledge today to roll out facial recognition in an apparent response to recent disorder is a pledge to plunder more vital police resources on mass surveillance that threatens rather than protects democracy,” said Silkie Carlo, director at Big Brother Watch.
“This AI surveillance turns members of the public into walking ID cards, is dangerously inaccurate, and has no explicit legal basis in the UK. Whilst common in Russia and China, live facial recognition is banned in Europe.
“It’s deeply worrying that the Prime Minister totally failed to address the causes of the violent, racist thuggery we have witnessed in Britain this week, let alone his failure to even address the causes of the heinous knife crime that has cruelly taken so many lives. To promise the country ineffective AI surveillance in these circumstances was frankly tone deaf and will give the public absolutely no confidence that this government has the competence or conviction to get tough on the causes of these crimes and protect the public.”
Facial recognition is deployed extensively across the UK, from high street retail to the police, which continues to defend its use of the technology.
London’s Metropolitan Police says it tests its solutions with the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It also said the algorithm it uses is “high-performing,” according to a 2023 report, although this has been challenged in the past.
The Met deploys its facial recognition tech as LFR, retrospective facial recognition (RFR), and operator-initiated facial recognition (OIFR).
RFR involves taking images that may or may not have been collected for the sole purpose of use with facial recognition technology and later applying the technology to those images for police. OIFR takes the form of a mobile app used by officers to capture an image of a person of interest and understand their identity when it isn’t known to them. The idea is that this saves the hassle of arresting them and identifying them while in custody.
The Met’s tests led to adjustments being made to LFR so that now there “is no statistical significance between demographic performances,” and there is also no variation with RFR or OIFR. ®