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Evening Standard
Evening Standard

Met Police facial recognition cameras scan 127k faces but arrest just nine

A deployment of facial recognition cameras in London led to just a handful of arrests despite taking the biometric data of thousands of people, new figures show.According to a freedom of information request obtained by the Standard, five deployments of live facial recognition cameras in Oxford Circus from February 27, 2020 to July 16, 2022, resulted in an estimated 125,786 faces which were scanned by the Met Police.Despite the large number of faces scanned by the cameras, only nine arrests were made over the course of the five operations.Although in use by the Met Police, human rights groups fear that the system has not been adequately tested to ensure its efficacy and may violate the privacy of members of the public.

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