Western Australia police concluded a five-month trial of real-time facial recognition technology, which scanned 1,380,882 faces across 100 deployments in 43 regional and metropolitan locations. The trial resulted in 122 arrests and nine incorrect alerts, according to WA police. During the deployments, which included three operations at the Perth Royal Show, officers also engaged with 146 registered sex offenders and located 10 people for welfare checks.
The WA police commissioner, Col Blanch, addressed the false matches at a media conference on Sunday, stating, “No one was arrested. No one made a complaint. Each one did result in an interaction with that person and asking them relevant questions.” Blanch acknowledged the technology was “not perfect” but maintained that officers followed up on alerts as they would if a member of the public raised suspicions.
Civil liberties advocates criticized the police framing of the error rate, with Bill Rowlings, chief executive of Civil Liberties Australia, arguing that the incorrect rate should be calculated by comparing arrests to convictions, stating, “If half the 122 arrested … are not convicted, the ‘incorrect’ rate will be 50%.” The trial guidelines involved cameras mounted on or near marked police vehicles scanning faces in designated public areas against an alert list from police databases, with images of people not on the list being pixelated and deleted immediately. The surveillance vans have since been removed from public deployment while the force conducts an internal evaluation of the technology’s performance and community impacts.
