Britain has become the only country in Europe to deploy real-time facial recognition on a large scale, with millions scanned outside supermarkets and at public events, a practice critics say “treats us like a nation of suspects.”
At London's Notting Hill Carnival, where 2 million people are expected to celebrate Afro-Caribbean culture over Sunday and Monday, facial-recognition cameras are being deployed near entrances and exits.
The police said their objective was to identify and intercept wanted individuals by scanning faces in large crowds and comparing them with thousands of suspects already in the police database.
The technology is "an effective policing tool which has already been successfully used to locate offenders at crime hotspots resulting in well over 1,000 arrests since the start of 2024," said Metropolitan Police chief Mark Rowley.
The technology was first tested in 2016 and its use has increased considerably over the past three years in the United Kingdom.
