Judgment Approved by the court for handing down.
R (Bridges) -v- CC South Wales & ors
third comprised 536 suspects (in effect, every person suspected of committing a crime
in SWP’s area). There were ten possible matches during the deployment. Of these two
were not true matches. In one of those cases there was no intervention. Of the eight true
matches there were two arrests.
27.
The Appellant says he was present at Queen Street on 21 December 2017, that he was
approximately 6-10 feet from the van and that he was, accordingly, in range of the
cameras. He states that he did not see signage and was given no other warning indicating
that AFR was in use prior to his being in close proximity to AFR-equipped vans.
27 March 2018 deployment
28.
On 27 March 2018 the Defence Exhibition took place at the Motorpoint Arena in
Cardiff. In previous years the event had attracted disorder and persons involved in past
protests had caused criminal damage and made two bomb hoax calls to disrupt the
event. AFR was live between 8:30 am and 4:00 pm with the cameras focusing on the
arena’s entrance.
29.
There were again three watchlists: one comprised subjects of interest who had been
arrested at the same event the previous year, five of whom had been convicted of a
variety of offences, another comprised 347 persons wanted on warrants, and the third
comprised 161 suspects (linked to crimes in SWP’s area ranging from summary only
offences to the most serious indictable offences). No arrests were made during this
deployment. There were no false alerts. There was one correct match: one of the six
people who had been arrested the previous year was correctly identified as being at the
event. She had made a false bomb report the previous year, and had been convicted of
that offence and sentenced to a suspended sentence order of 18 months’ imprisonment.
The information that the offender was at the event was passed to the Event Commander,
but no further action was taken.
30.
The Appellant’s evidence was that he attended a protest outside the Motorpoint Arena.
He stated in his witness statement that he was 25-30 metres away from the AFRequipped van, but at one point he would have been closer than that. He said that, prior
to seeing the van, he was not aware that AFR was in use, and he did not observe SWP
officers providing any information about the use of AFR.
Relevant legal framework
31.
Relevant legal and other material is set out in the Annex to this judgment.
The proceedings
32.
The claim was filed by the Appellant on 3 October 2018 and issued on 18 October 2018.
It was accompanied by a detailed Statement of Facts and Grounds, in which it was
stated that the Appellant challenged (1) the unlawful use of the technology against him
on the two occasions mentioned above, and (2) SWP’s ongoing use of AFR in public
places in the police area in which he resides, giving rise to clear risk of the technology
again being used against him. It was stated that the grounds for the challenge were (1)
breach of Article 8 of the Convention; (2) breach of Articles 10 and 11 of the
Convention; (3) breaches of data protection law, namely section 4(4) of the DPA 1998
taken with the first data protection principle in Schedule 1, section 35(1) of the DPA