The Metropolitan Police Service announced on Friday, 24 January, that it will begin the operational use of Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology.

The technology, from NEC, provides police officers with an additional tool to assist them in doing what officers have always done – to try to locate and arrest wanted people.

This is not a case of technology taking over from traditional policing; this is a system which simply gives police officers a ‘prompt’, suggesting “that person over there may be the person you’re looking for”, it is always the decision of an officer whether or not to engage with someone.

This thing has NOTHING to do with hunting for criminals (due to horrible error rates). But has all to do with tracking specific people and making and storing routes for everyone (they'll be used in proper time), such things can filter out false positives quite good.