WA facial recognition trial ends after 1.38m scans and 122 arrests
Western Australia police concluded a five-month real-time facial recognition trial on 31 October, scanning 1.38 million faces and making 122 arrests, with nine false alerts.
The story in focus
Western Australia police ended a five-month real-time facial recognition trial on 31 October, scanning 1,380,882 faces across 100 deployments and 43 locations, leading to 122 arrests and nine incorrect alerts. Police commissioner Col Blanch defended the low error rate, while civil liberties advocates questioned the framing and proportionality.
- The trial scanned 1,380,882 faces in 100 deployments across 43 locations.
- It resulted in 122 arrests, engagement with 146 registered sex offenders and 10 welfare checks.
- Nine incorrect alerts were recorded against 1.38 million scans, an error rate of 0.00065%.
- Police commissioner Col Blanch said no one was arrested over false alerts and no complaints were made.
- Civil Liberties Australia and the Human Rights Law Centre criticised the error rate framing and proportionality.
Trial outcomes
Western Australia police said the five-month real-time facial recognition trial concluded on Saturday 31 October. The technology scanned 1,380,882 faces after 100 deployments across 43 regional and metropolitan locations.
The deployments led to 122 arrests, engagement with 146 registered sex offenders and 10 welfare checks. Three operations at the Perth royal show scanned 223,749 faces, producing 15 alerts, three arrests and seven interactions with registered sex offenders.
A police spokesperson confirmed nine incorrect alerts, an error rate of 0.00065%. Police commissioner Col Blanch said officers engaged with each individual and that no one was arrested or made a complaint over the false matches.
Advocacy concerns
Civil Liberties Australia chief executive Bill Rowlings said police were overstating the accuracy by measuring errors against total scans rather than arrests. He suggested the incorrect rate should be calculated by comparing how many of the 122 arrests result in convictions.
Human Rights Law Centre legal director Sarah Schwartz said every false match involves a real person who may be stopped or investigated because an algorithm erred. She questioned whether biometric surveillance on this scale is proportionate in a democratic society and raised concern about deployments at public demonstrations.
The office of the information commissioner WA said when the trial was announced that it was not involved in implementing it and warned of collective privacy harms.
Next steps
The surveillance vans have been withdrawn from public deployment while police conduct an internal evaluation of the technology's performance and community impacts, including a review of safeguards and whether all requirements were met.
Under trial guidelines, cameras on or near marked police vehicles scanned faces in designated public areas and matched them against an alert list from police databases. Police said images of people not on the list were pixelated in real time and deleted immediately without being stored.
What happens to the facial recognition surveillance vans now that the trial is over?
They have been removed from public deployment while Western Australia police conduct an internal evaluation of how the technology performed and its community impacts, including a review of safeguards.
Sources & further reading
- Police use facial recognition to scan one million faces in WA trial leading to 122 arrests ↗The Guardian
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