Croydon (Parliament Politics Magazine) – Controversial Orwellian-style police cameras have arrived in Croydon, raising concerns over surveillance and privacy in the borough’s public spaces.
For the first time in British history, the Metropolitan Police have been granted permission to place permanent Live Facial Recognition cameras on North End and London Road, bringing Croydon’s dismal future closer to the bleak future envisioned by George Orwell in his classic 1984.
Despite serious worries about the legality of the monitoring methods and doubts about their efficacy, the North End and London Road will be the first places in the nation to have live facial recognition cameras installed permanently.
Civil rights organizations and Green Party politicians have suggested that the Live Facial Recognition cameras are being used for racial profiling, with their findings biased against Black people.
They are also questioning whether the kit is actually that effective at combating crime. Big Brother will be watching you, and it is likely to cause a lot of trouble.
The Labour MPs and council members of Croydon have remained silent on the matter.
The news likely caused Chris Philp, the Tory MP for Croydon South and the shadow home secretary, to pee himself with excitement.
During the Live Facial Recognition (LFR) camera trials in Croydon town center, 128,518 faces were scanned, yet just 133 people were arrested—a mere 1-in-966 arrest rate.
Zoë Garbutt, a member of the Green Party Assembly, said, “This means that over 120,000 people in Croydon were tracked by the police for no reason at all.”
Following the scanning of 160,000 faces in a comparable LFR trial conducted in Cardiff, police did not make any arrests.
“Facial recognition subjects everyone to constant surveillance, which goes against the democratic principle that you shouldn’t be monitored unless there’s a suspicion of wrongdoing,”
Garbutt said this week.
After asking the Met pointed questions over the policy during the trials last year, Rebecca Vincent of the civil rights organization Big Brother Watch highlighted her displeasure at this latest action. Until legislative safeguards are put in place, Vincent stated, “it’s time to stop this steady slide into a dystopian nightmare and halt all use of LFR technology.”
“Ever since this announcement, my inbox has been flooded with messages from local residents concerned about this attack on their privacy and possible consequences for them,”
said Croydon councillor Ria Patel, whose Fairfield district includes North End and a portion of London Road.
And the Green councillor said that, during the police’s camera trials,
“Hundreds of people have been stopped and questioned by the police when they have done nothing wrong. There are even reports of people being arrested just because they didn’t want to be scanned by the cameras.”
The near-weekly visits from the Met’s camera vans will be replaced by the fixed cameras in Croydon, which are anticipated to go online in June or July. There are now four specialized vehicles in the Met fleet, and two more are being ordered.
Since the first, in Croydon in December 2023, police in London have used live face recognition deployments to arrest about 360 individuals during the course of the trials.
The Times reported that the additional cameras “will only operate when officers are nearby and ready to respond to database matches.” They will be mounted on existing lampposts or affixed to buildings.
Earlier this month, Superintendent Mitch Carr wrote to community groups: “I am currently working with the central team to install fixed LFR cameras in Croydon town centre.
This will mean our use of LFR technology will be far more embedded as a ‘business as usual’ approach rather than relying on the availability of the LFR vans that are in high demand across London.
It will remain the case that the cameras are only switched on when officers are deployed on the ground ready to respond to alerts. The end result will see cameras covering a defined area and will give us much more flexibility around the days and times we can run the operations.”
And there will, of course, be some “community engagement events”. Because there always is…
The technology behind live facial recognition cameras examines people’s features as they pass by, compares the photos to the Met’s database of individuals sought for a variety of crimes, and notifies police if a match is found.
According to the Met, if there is no match, the data is instantly erased. In contrast to other facial recognition systems, the Metropolitan Police deny that theirs demonstrates racial bias.
However, more than half of all face recognition deployments last year were in places with a higher percentage of Black inhabitants than the London norm, according to Garbutt and City Hall Greens.
“This highlights a troubling trend of disproportionate surveillance in communities already facing systemic inequalities and over-policing.”
According to the Greens, about 2 million people in London have had their faces scanned since the initial deployment 16 months ago, most of them without even realizing it. There have been 804 arrests made overall.
Scotland Yard released the following statement at the beginning of the LFR trial: “The Met heard concerns from people in Croydon about violence on their streets.” Of course they did; eleven people had been killed on the borough’s streets in 2023.
However, LFR most likely wouldn’t have stopped any of them if it had been in effect at the time.
One woman (who failed to appear in court for a criminal damage offense) and seven men were among the people arrested on North End during a normal day’s sweep using LFR. Four of the men had been arrested for various theft charges, one was wanted for drug offenses, one had violated their tag conditions, and one was a burglar wanted for recall to prison.
They were all wanted for blatantly violent crimes.
In fact, the news of the technology’s deployment coincides with the Croydon Mayor and the Metropolitan Police praising themselves for the borough’s declining rates of various types of crime.
The decision to deploy LFR cameras permanently in Croydon “marks a dangerous step toward normalising invasive surveillance technology”, City Hall’s Greens said, highlighting “ongoing uncertainty about the implementation, regulation and transparency of facial recognition”.
Garbutt said,
“The Met claims live facial recognition has been a success in London, but how can treating millions of Londoners as suspects be considered a success?
The arrest figures are low, and it’s really just subjecting us to surveillance without our knowledge, with black Londoners being disproportionately targeted.”
The action was called “a worrying escalation in the use of LFR with no oversight or legislative basis” by Big Brother Watch. The Index on Censorship and Amnesty International have also demanded that LFR surveillance be prohibited.
According to the Commons’ Justice and Home Affairs Committee, before the technology is further implemented, main legislation should be established by Parliament.
Croydon Councillor Patel said:
“We know that facial recognition technology is not very accurate and is more likely to misidentify innocent people of colour as potential suspects.
There has been no discussion of installing these cameras at Croydon Council and residents have been given no say whatsoever.
We have not given our consent, and these plans must be stopped immediately.”
What are the key features of the facial recognition rollout?
Two fixed LFR cameras will be mounted on lampposts and buildings in the heart of Croydon, particularly on North End and London Road. A database of known criminals will be compared with the faces scanned by these cameras. Automatic deletion of non-matches will occur.
The police hope to use this technology to minimize crime and swiftly identify wanted offenders. Hundreds of arrests were made during a two-year trial with mobile LFR vans, including the capture of two rapists who might not have been captured otherwise.
According to critics like Rebecca Vincent from Big Brother Watch, the technology expands the monitoring state by checking everyone without raising any red flags. Additionally, questions have been raised concerning the monitoring and constitutionality of such uncontrolled technology.