Police use facial recognition to scan one million faces in WA trial leading to 122 arrests

In a trial conducted in Western Australia over five months, facial recognition technology scanned the faces of over one million people, leading to 122 arrests. Nine false alerts were generated during the process, resulting in an error rate of 0.00065%. The technology was deployed through 100 surveillance vans over 43 locations, with three high-profile operations at the Perth Royal Show alone scanning 223,749 faces and resulting in 15 alerts, three arrests, and seven interactions with registered sex offenders.

Police Commissioner Col Blanch emphasized that no one was arrested or made a complaint due to false alerts, describing the low error rate as "very, very, very low." Civil liberties advocates criticized the way the police framed the error rate, suggesting it should be calculated based on convictions rather than overall alerts. The independent privacy watchdog, the Office of the Information Commissioner WA, warned of potential privacy harms in the trial, which has now been discontinued while the police conduct an internal evaluation of its performance and community impact.