Justice Sub-Committee on Policing - the Scottish Parliament: Facial Recognition: How Policing in Scotland Makes Use of This Technology (original) (raw)

As a result of interest from the SubCommittee in my recent study exploring the impacts of body-worn cameras (BWC), I hereby provide further evidence that explores the views expressed by UK police officers on the use of live facial recognition (LFR) technology. 1. Background and methodology This research project explores police-public encounters mediated by BWC. Methodologically, we consider police officers' perceptions of and their engagement with these technologies in their professional practice. In total 26 semi-structured interviews were conducted with police officers from two British Police forces in different geographic locations (South and North of the UK). These interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim, without recording participants' names. 2. Findings These interviews were focused on the use of BWC and considered how these devices might be accompanied with other emerging technologies (such as LFR). However, the position of optimism and confidence in the potential uses of this technology was mainly shadowed by a position of scepticism and disbelief in scenarios where LFR is possible or sensible currently. In this short paper we will explore some of the concerns that were discussed by police officers when considering the potential use of LFR. 2.1. Acceptance and resistance The participants discussed how the adoption of an emerging technology such as LFR is subject to a process of either acceptance or resistance from both members of the public and police organisations. Several examples were used to illustrate how technologies were accepted in the past and are now used in a daily basis (such as automatic number plate recognition) and how LFR could be just a "step further" in order to "read the picture, the image, of the person" in the future (Larry, 12 years of service). Nonetheless, officers agreed that they will face backlash from the public if LFR is not deemed to work effectively. For instance, PC Mark (27 years of service, firearms unit) believed that: "We will be using a lot in the future. I wouldn't say debug it and get one that works but then it is just one of those things that will be used to fight crime. I would imagine lots of people would moan about it to start with, but I would imagine once we get a system that works properly we will end up using it." Even if LFR is reliable in the long run, the police officers discussed strategies of resistance that will be deployed in order to avoid being recognised by the brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk