Judgment Approved by the court for handing down.
R (Bridges) -v- CC South Wales & ors
In addition to having security guidance and policies embedded
throughout SWP business, SWP also has specialist security,
cyber and resilience staff to help ensure that information is
protected from risks of accidental or unlawful destruction, loss,
alteration, unauthorised disclosure or access.”
SWP Standard Operating Procedures (“SOP”)
38.
SWP has Automatic Facial Recognition SOP which apply to their use of AFR. They
were published in November 2018 (i.e. after the dates of the 2 events in question), when
a separate facial recognition
section was added to SWP's website, and the SOPs
were published on that webpage. The SOP's primary features include (see especially
pages 6 and 14):
(1) A stipulation that watchlists should be “proportionate and necessary” for each
deployment and primary factors for the inclusion on watchlists include will be
“watchlist size, image quality, image provenance and rationale for inclusion”.
(2) The numbers of images included within a watchlist cannot exceed 2,000 due to
contract restrictions “but in any event1 in 1000 false positive alert rate should not be
exceeded”.
(3) Children under the age of 18 will not normally feature in a watchlist due to “the
reduced accuracy of the system when considering immature faces”.
(4) The decision for an AFR deployment wherever possible will ultimately be made by
the Silver Commander.
(5) The rationale for the deployment of AFR is to be recorded in a pre-deployment
report.
(6) Signs advertising the use of the technology are to be deployed to ensure that where
possible an individual is aware of the deployment before their image is captured.
(7) Interventions are not to be made on the basis of a similarity score alone and when
an intervention is made intervention officer will establish the identity of the individual
by traditional policing methods.
(8) Details of the retention of different types of information gathered during an AFR
deployment.
SWP Operational Advice
39.
SWP have also issued guidance in the form of “Operational Advice for Police Trials of
Live Facial Recognition” for use by officers conducting the trials which has been
submitted to the National Police Chiefs Council.