Judgment Approved by the court for handing down.
127.
R (Bridges) -v- CC South Wales & ors
Mr Beer also drew our attention to what is said at page 20 of the same document:
“Concerns have been raised by privacy experts that an individual
may seek to enquire as to whether they have been included in a
watchlist outside of the 24-hours retention period. Therefore, it
has been deemed appropriate to be able to re-engineer watchlists.
This can now be achieved via Niche RMS ‘back-end’ database
by recording the nominal number of an individual extracted into
a watchlist for on given date, this added functionality is available
from October 2018.”
With respect, it seems to us that deals with a technical matter and does not govern the
question of who can be properly placed on a watchlist.
128.
Finally, in the context of who can be placed on a watchlist Mr Beer drew our attention
to SWP’s Standard Operating Procedure, at page 6, where it is said:
“3.
AFR Locate
The system works by means of a pre-populated Watch List
which will contain information and images of subjects and a predefined response should these subjects be located by the system.
Watchlists will be both proportionate and necessary for each
deployment with the rationale for inclusion detailed pre-event in
the AFR Locate deployment report.
Primary factors for consideration for inclusion within a watchlist
will be watchlist size, image quality, image provenance and
rationale for inclusion.
The numbers of images included within a watchlist cannot
exceed 2,000 due to contract restrictions but in any event 1 in
1000 false positive alert rate should not be exceeded.
Children under the age of 18 will not ordinarily feature in a
watchlist due the reduced accuracy of the system when
considering immature faces.
However, if there is a significant risk of harm to that individual
a risk based approach will be adopted and rationale for inclusion
evidenced within the deployment report.
The decision for an AFR deployment wherever possible will
ultimately be made by the Silver Commander with the DSD
project team acting as tactical advisors. Wherever possible the
deployment of AFR Locate should be detailed with the Silver
Commanders Tactical plan.
If a deployment does not feature a Silver Commander the
rationale for deployment will be ratified by the Digital Services