During the five-month deployment, cameras monitored public areas including major events like the Perth Royal Show to cross-reference pedestrians with internal database alerts. Faces not matching the system's watchlists were pixelated in real time and discarded immediately without being stored. The deployment generated nine false matches, which led to individual police questioning but concluded without any formal complaints or wrongful arrests. Surveillance vehicles have now been pulled from public operation while Western Australia police assess the technology's overall performance and privacy safeguards.
Key points
Authorities immediately removed the camera-equipped vans from service while evaluating th…: Authorities immediately removed the camera-equipped vans from service while evaluating the operational results and community impact.
The state privacy watchdog raised concerns over collective privacy harms after not being…: The state privacy watchdog raised concerns over collective privacy harms after not being consulted on the trial's rollout.
Rights advocates argued the tool improperly scans citizens without suspicion and cautione…: Rights advocates argued the tool improperly scans citizens without suspicion and cautioned that true accuracy relies on future court convictions.
Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1
More than a million people have had their faces scanned in a trial of real-time facial recognition technology in Western Australia, resulting in 122 arrests and nine incorrect alerts.
WA police said under the five-month trial, which concluded on Saturday, the technology scanned 1,380,882 faces after 100 deployments across 43 regional and metropolitan locations.
Alongside the 122 arrests, the alerts led officers to engage with 146 registered sex offenders and locate 10 people for a welfare check.
The deployments included three operations at the Perth Royal Show, where 223,749 faces were scanned, resulting in 15 alerts, three arrests and seven “interactions” with registered sex offenders.
A police spokesperson confirmed the system generated nine incorrect alerts against the total 1.38m scans, meaning there was an error rate of 0.00065%.
Addressing the false matches at a media conference on Sunday, the WA police commissioner, Col Blanch, confirmed officers engaged with each individual.
“I want to be very clear on those false alerts,” he said. “No one was arrested. No one made a complaint. Each one did result in an interaction with that…
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