Add StudioX as a preferred source on GooglePolice in Western Australia say a five-month trial of real-time facial recognition technology scanned more than a million faces, resulting in 122 arrests and nine incorrect alerts, according to The Guardian World.
The trial ended on Saturday. WA police said the technology scanned 1,380,882 faces over 100 deployments at 43 regional and metropolitan locations.
What police say the trial achieved
Besides the arrests, the alerts led officers to engage with 146 registered sex offenders and to locate 10 people for a welfare check.
The deployments included three operations at the Perth Royal Show. There, 223,749 faces were scanned, producing 15 alerts, three arrests and seven interactions with registered sex offenders.
A police spokesperson confirmed the system generated nine incorrect alerts out of the 1.38 million scans, which police put at an error rate of 0.00065%.
Police Commissioner Col Blanch addressed the false matches at a media conference on Sunday. He said officers engaged with each person who was wrongly flagged. “No one was arrested. No one made a complaint,” he said.
Blanch acknowledged the number was not zero and said police would like it to be. He said the technology was “not perfect” and that authorities knew this going into the trial. He added that officers followed up on alerts in the same way they would if a member of the public raised suspicions about someone.
He also said the trial focused on using modern technology responsibly to identify people who presented a risk, while letting most people go about their day without any impact.
Civil liberties groups challenge the numbers
Civil liberties advocates have criticised how police framed the error rate. Bill Rowlings, chief executive of Civil Liberties Australia, said police were “severely gilding the lily” with the 0.00065% figure.
Rowlings suggested the rate should instead be judged by how many of the arrests end in convictions. He said the true figure would only be known when the 122 people arrested have their day in court. If half were not convicted, he said, the incorrect rate would be 50%.
He also said police carried out almost 1.4 million scans “with no reasonable suspicion whatsoever”.
When the trial was announced, the state’s independent privacy watchdog, the Office of the Information Commissioner WA, said it was not involved in implementing it. The watchdog warned of “collective privacy harms”. The office was contacted for comment on the results.
How the system worked
Under the trial guidelines, cameras mounted on or placed near marked police vehicles scanned faces in designated public areas. The system matched them against an alert list drawn from police databases.
Police said images of people who were not on the list were pixelated in real time and deleted immediately without being stored.
The trial drew backlash over privacy and algorithmic bias. Experts say the technology could disproportionately affect marginalised groups who are already overrepresented on police watchlists. They note that facial recognition algorithms have historically had higher false-match rates for people with darker skin tones.
What happens next
The surveillance vans have been removed from public deployment while the force carries out an internal evaluation. It will examine how the technology performed on the ground and its community impacts, including “reviewing the safeguards and whether all requirements were met”.
Source: The Guardian World
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