Police Scotland is set to embrace AI as part of a crime crackdown – with facial recognition used to help officers get violent criminals off the streets.
Chief Constable Jo Farrell said the force is set to adopt measures which are already being used by their colleagues down south, in London’s Metropolitan Police Service.
She revealed the plans while launching Operation Evolve, a new three-year policing plan for the whole of Scotland, at Police Scotland headquarters.
At the launch in Tulliallan, Fife, she said that not bringing in AI-assisted measures would amount of “an abdication” for the country’s single police force.
The Times reported that she expressed her support on harnessing the facial recognition technology which she says can “tackle crime and keep people safe”.
The Met Police’s trial of Big Brother-style live facial recognition was so successful the force described it as the biggest crime detection breakthrough since DNA.
Cameras which scan faces are mounted to police vehicles, with the facial images collected cross-referenced against the pictures of people on wanted lists, and officers are then alerted to a match.
Ms Farrell said: “We’re awash with data. We need to use the latest technology to convert that so that we are fighting crime effectively and we are able to operate as efficiently as we can.
“We want to open up conversations about live facial recognition. These are tools that will enable us to tackle crime and keep people safe.”
She added: “Not using those biometrics which exist, in order to identify violent perpetrators, or those who commit crimes against the most vulnerable, I think would be an abdication.”
The AI-assisted software has been likened to advances enabling the early detection of cancer in the NHS. Ms Farrell said: “Let’s draw a parallel.
“If, within the NHS, we get told that AI will help detect cancer quicker we’ll probably say to ourselves, ‘Well, that sounds like a really good thing’.
“Our challenge is if I say, ‘AI will help us to take violent perpetrators off the streets quicker and will keep children safe’, then somehow I need to convince you that I’m doing it in an ethical and appropriate way.”
The police chief said her goal was for people to have confidence that facial recognition could be used “appropriately, without bias, for the greater good of keeping people safe”.
In other police forces, advances in biometric technology have been able to reduce time taken to scan images of online child abuse suspects.
This has been slashed from three days to just one hour using facial matching. Police Scotland has been approached for comment on the plans.
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