Clacton: First Live Facial Recognition deployment at Airshow

“Live Facial Recognition is an investment in our communities and will help keep people safe”.

That’s from one of our top officers as we announce the first deployment of our new Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology.

We trialled the technology in October last year, borrowing equipment from South Wales Police.

Across two days – one where it was deployed in Southend and another where it was in Chelmsford – it resulted in five positive alerts and three arrests, including for rape and robbery.

Following this successful trial, we have now, supported by funding from the Police, Fire, and Crime Commissioner for Essex, purchased our own equipment and it will be first deployed at the Clacton Airshow on Thursday 22 and Friday 23 August.

We will be deploying elsewhere in the county in the future and will tell the public in a reasonable period before the deployment.

Assistant Chief Constable Andy Pritchard said:

“We’re an innovative and forward-thinking force, utilising new technology to keep people safe and deter crime.

“Cutting edge technology is playing an important role in protecting people, responding to and investigating crimes, and getting justice for victims.

“Our Live Facial Recognition technology will be used to locate people we want to speak to in connection with ongoing investigations and to manage people with court orders or conditions.

“Criminals cannot think they can walk around our communities without being caught and our successful trial last year showed LFR is an effective way of locating people.

“Our first deployment at the Clacton Airshow is a really exciting moment for the force.

“We’re deploying there to ensure you’re safe if you’re planning to go to the airshow.

“We want you and your family to enjoy the airshow and using LFR will help keep you safe and have a good day.

“We’re looking for specific people wanted for serious offences and to enforce orders so ordinary members of the public should have no concerns about the vans being there.

“If you are going to the airshow and see our officers who are operating the vans, please come and say hello and ask questions about the technology.”

ACC Pritchard said this technology is an investment in our communities: “It’s an effective way of finding people we want to speak to and keeping the public safe.

“Using LFR to find someone can be a more efficient use of resources than a team of officers carrying out various time-consuming enquiries to locate them.

“This technology can save time for our officers, leaving them able to focus on additional force priorities to protect and help the public, and further investigations.”

LFR is targeted to focus on specific people we’re trying to locate.

ACC Pritchard said: “We take people’s privacy really seriously.

“The technology utilises CCTV camera feeds to LFR software to scan faces against a predetermined database or ‘watch list’ of people of interest.

“The scanning of an image takes less than a second and an image of anyone not on the watchlist is automatically and immediately deleted and not stored.

“When there is a positive match, appropriate action will be taken by officers on the ground to confirm ID and then assess what the next action is to be taken.”

The force already uses similar technology to identify suspects with great effect.

ACC Pritchard said: “We already use retrospective facial recognition technology and have had some good success with it.

“This is basically where we have a CCTV or doorbell image of a suspect and run it through police databases.

“The facial recognition technology then tells us if there’s a match between the image and someone on the database.

“Between May and June we used this technology to help identify almost 80 suspects this way and it really helps move investigations forward.”

Jane Gardner, Deputy Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner for Essex, said: “The PFCC is supportive of LFR in so far Essex Police use it for its intended purpose of identifying people wanted for arrest and so take them off the streets in a way which is effective and accurate.

“We want to reassure Essex people that the PFCC will continue to scrutinise use of LFR to make sure it is used proportionately and fairly.”

You can read more about Live Facial Recognition on our website.

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