2021/24607 - Use of super-recognisers
REQUEST
I am writing to submit a Freedom of Information request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 in relation to the use of 'super-recognisers' by your police force.
Background
‘Super recognisers’ refers to a category of police officer judged to hold above-average abilities in identifying facial characteristics and matching images of the same face across different media.
According to a 2016 article on The Guardian:
The Super-recogniser Unit is based on the third floor of a grey stone police building in Lambeth in south London. It is the only unit of its kind in the world. It was set up in May 2015, and moved from Scotland Yard in July... Alongside the super-recognisers working full-time in the unit, there are around 150 working in police departments across London... Since it was established, the unit has made 2,250 identifications.
Another publication of the same year further adds:
The main function of the super-recogniser officers was to attend large events, such as music concerts and the Notting Hill Carnival, and spot criminals there. In their downtime, they were tasked with trawling through the Met’s forensic image database, which holds more than 100,000 stills of unidentified suspects captured on CCTV camera or on mobile phones in London since 2011. Each picture is linked to an unsolved crime – in essence, a cold case – and is tagged with the date, location and type of offence, along with the suspect’s distinguishing features, such as race and hairstyle.
In 2018, The Guardian reported that "the Met announced it would abandon the use of facial recognition software at this year’s Notting Hill Carnival..., but that it would instead deploy super recognisers, who it considered better able to accurately spot the faces of troublemakers in dense crowds."
Finally, according to information released by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS):
The Super Recogniser Unit was transformed into the Central Image Investigation Unit (CIIU) in 2017 following a number of organisational changes within the MPS. In the last financial year, 7,354 potential suspect identifications were made.
Request
I would be grateful if you could please provide me with answers to all the questions below:
- If your police force uses 'super-recognisers', what is the total number of identifications they made in the year 2020?
- Was there an increase or decrease (and by how many) in the number of super-recognisers employed by your police force after August 2018?
- Does your police force believe that the facial identification process carried out by 'super-recognisers' for the purposes of criminal investigations or crime detection satisfies the definition of processing under the Data Protection Act 2018? If not, why not?
- Does your police force believe that the facial identification process carried out by 'super-recognisers' for the purposes of criminal investigations or crime detection amounts to an interference with Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights? If not, why not?