Very excitingly, it turns out that my local council, Hammersmith and Fulham, already has more police cameras and facial recognition technology than anywhere in the country and is set to have more, now that the Council has voted to spend more than £3million in funding to "enhance" the CCTV network. The borough already has more cameras per person than anywhere in the UK with more than 2,000 working already.
The additional funding is intended to "improve crime detection and prevention, as well as [putting] additional cameras in parks", according to a council report. "This will elevate H&F to an exceptionally advanced level of CCTV crime detection capability," they say. The cameras will go outside Shepherd’s Bush market, Westfield shopping centre, which is the size of an actual village, and King Street.
So if you’re a serial killer on the loose, best steer clear of King Street, which goes from Hammersmith Broadway to the badlands of Chiswick. I don’t, I have to say, have many dealings with the local criminal classes; the drug dealers around my street seem not to hang around after passing over envelopes and the young people who take other people’s bikes vanish in short order afterwards. And I have never, on principle, visited Westfield. It’s nice, of course, to think that I shall be unmolested on the way home from the Patisserie Ste Anne, the best French bakery in London, but half a minute’s reflection is giving me pause.
We can probably trust facial recognition technology to be used prudently. But for how long?
Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) is brilliant at identifying known criminals and suspects. As the Met Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, pointed out, at the Notting Hill Carnival, it led to 61 arrests – including 16 for serious violence-related offences and 13 for violence against women and girls. "The first arrest happened within five minutes of going live, locating someone wanted on a prison recall since 2015”, he said in a BBC interview. "Another suspect was wanted for GBH, having allegedly stabbed a victim five times with a machete.” Do I want alleged machete-wielding lunatics to be at large? Actually, let’s drop the rhetorical questions. We all like the idea of violent criminals or those reasonably suspected of criminal acts to be nicked by Sir Mark’s finest, don’t we?
So what’s not to like about cameras which can do much of the police’s work for it? It’s this. At present, we can probably trust Sir Mark and the Home Secretary, the rather admirable Shabana Mahmood, to use the technology prudently. Sir Mark is at pains to say that its use must be “intelligence-led”, though it doesn’t need much intelligence to work out the likelihood of trouble at the Notting Hill Carnival. He also tells us that the technology doesn’t keep data for anyone who isn’t on police files. So, being more or less respectable, I should be fine.
But for how long? Under the present government, although you can be arrested for posting things online that other people categorise as hate speech (the offence being in the eyes of the offended party), you are unlikely to be arrested for, say, going on the equivalent of the Countryside Alliance march (which I didn’t attend), or a Palestine protest (the last one I witnessed was very well-behaved). But is anyone rash enough to bet that with a different government, with different priorities, people with strong and heterodox views won’t find themselves on a police database? How about if I join a pro-life protest just outside the exclusion zone at an abortion clinic? I can’t say I care terribly for the pressure group, Liberty, but I think they’re onto something when they raise the spectre of mass surveillance. FRT may target serial killers today; tomorrow it may be looking out for Islamophobes, as defined by the Government’s worrying commission on the subject.
The only real safeguard for the process is if it’s under either judicial or parliamentary scrutiny. So, if Hammersmith is to scan its residents for known criminals, that should be approved every six months or a year by a High Court judge or by parliament. The same goes for using Facial Recognition at protests or festivals. This is a technology that needs surveillance itself.
Bobbies on the beat may help deter criminals. There was a sighting in the summer of a couple of police on bicycles, but it was a rare treat
And you know, there may be a reason why the council is having recourse to technology. I’m sure that there are lots of coppers on the beat – practically Dixon of Dock Green – around the borough somewhere; it’s just that I never seem to see them. There was a sighting in the summer of a couple of police on bicycles, but it was a rare treat. Just a thought, but if you want to deter criminals, actual human police walking the streets might help.
Another consideration is that the very fine police station on Shepherd’s Bush Road, all of ten minutes from me, is now closed. Those looking up its opening hours find themselves redirected to the Hammersmith police station. But the front desk there is also due to close. I think that means that when I’m on the run from the serial killer, I should make my way to the Charing Cross police station, some distance away. (And regarding that particular outfit, a friend of mine who lives yards from it hasn’t had much joy in asking for protection from the local aggressive drug-dealers.)
If Hammersmith and Fulham has £3 million to spare, might it spend the money on actual police and real police stations? They’re less efficient than AI-assisted technology but they’re a whole lot less worrying. Meanwhile, I am considering Anna Wintour-style large sunglasses when I’m out and about in future.
Melanie McDonagh is a columnist for The Standard
