The PSNI has set up a committee to review the “operational feasibility” of introducing live facial recognition technology in Northern Ireland, as police in England and Wales prepare to significantly expand their AI-powered surveillance tactics.
The force has set up a facial recognition control committee to monitor programs in other parts of the UK and works directly with industry providers, but claims no decision has yet been made on whether to introduce the controversial technology.
In a statement to the Irish News, the PSNI said the force “currently does not use live facial recognition technology and does not have existing capacity, contracts or funding in place to deploy it”.
The statement further said the PSNI considers live facial recognition and artificial intelligence to be “separate matters”.
“The PSNI has an internal Facial Recognition Control Board which oversees national LFR programmes, including those run by the Metropolitan Police, South Wales Police and more recently British Transport Police,” it said.
“At this stage, we are working with these programs and their industry providers only to assess operational feasibility.”
“Work is at an early exploration and consultation stage,” the PSNI said in a statement, adding that no final decision had yet been made on whether to introduce the technology here.
West Belfast MLA Gerry Carroll called the news “extremely worrying”.
He argues that live facial recognition “invades privacy in public spaces, limits people’s freedom to protest, and destroys the concept of the presumption of innocence.”
A People Before Profit representative said: “Introducing this technology would be a fundamental and unacceptable violation of civil liberties by a service that only recently was found to be unable to adequately protect personal data.”
His reference to data protection comes in the wake of a major data breach by the PSNI in August 2023, in which the details of 10,000 officers and staff were accidentally published online.
Carroll said facial recognition technology “has been found to be discriminatory against communities of color” and has been “roundly criticized by countless human rights organizations and privacy experts.”
He called on the PSNI and the justice minister to “immediately halt all attempts to replicate Labour’s disastrous policy decisions in the north”.
The development comes as the UK Government announced plans to expand the number of live facial recognition vans in England and Wales from 10 to 50, alongside a £115m investment in the National AI Center for Police.
The technology, already used by forces such as the Metropolitan Police and British Transport Police, is designed to catch criminals on police watchlists by scanning their faces in public places.
