Western Australia police scan 1.38 million faces and arrest 122 people in recognition trial
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
One trial demonstrated both the practical value of recognition to police and the dispute over mass checks of passersby, where even a rare error becomes a real person's stop.
Over five months, the real-time system was used in 100 deployments across 43 locations. Police reported 122 arrests, 146 interactions with registered sex offenders and nine false alerts; according to police, no one was arrested because of a false match. Images of people not on the watchlist were pixelated and deleted immediately. Commissioner Col Blanch called the false-alert rate very low while acknowledging the technology is imperfect. Civil Liberties Australia objects to calculating the error rate against all 1.38 million scans and proposes assessing court outcomes for those arrested. The Human Rights Law Centre points to the consequences of every wrongful stop and questions whether mass biometric surveillance is proportionate. Camera vans have been withdrawn while results and safeguards undergo an internal review.
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