Labour plans to consult on the use of live facial recognition (LFR) technology before expanding it across England, the new policing minister has told the party’s annual conference.
Sarah Jones, a Home Office minister, said the government would “put some parameters” over when and where it could be used in future.
Campaigners claim the police have been allowed to self-regulate their use of the technology because of the lack of a legal framework and deploy the technology’s algorithm at lower settings that are biased against ethnic minorities and women.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission has said its use is unlawful and incompatible with European laws.
Speaking at a Tony Blair Institute fringe meeting in Liverpool, Jones said: “We need to put some parameters around what we can use facial recognition for.
“There has been some advice on how we use it. But we need to go further to make sure it’s clear when it should be used and when it shouldn’t be used, to put some structure around it.
“Because there isn’t really much of a structure around what it’s used for at the moment. We need to look at whether that’s enough and whether we need to do more.”
Jones, the MP for Croydon West, said Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary and a fellow Croydon MP, had supported its use after it was deployed to catch criminals in thesouth London borough.
“Chris Philp is very keen on it and talks about it all the time as well. And what we have seen from Croydon is that it works.
“We just need to make sure it’s clear what it’s going to be useful for going forward, if we are going to use it more, if we do want to roll it out across the country, what are the parameters?” she said.
“Let’s make sure people understand that it’s a conversation we need to have, because people have raised it as an issue, both parliamentarians and the public, and they want to understand how this is going to be used.
“We are going to consult over it. It is going to be very important in the future. It is something that started under the last government and something we think they got right.”
Civil liberty groups have called on the Metropolitan police to drop the use of LFR cameras after a high court challenge was launched last month by Shaun Thompson, an anti-knife campaigner. Thompson, a Black British man, was wrongly identified by LFR as a criminal, held by police, and then faced demands from officers for his fingerprints.
Asked about the concerns of racial bias, Jones said: “I think the technology has improved over the years that it has been used and it is now broadly accurate.
“I think we can reassure people … we have used it to catch hundreds of dangerous criminals. But of course we need to make sure that it is being used in a correct way.”
