'Game-changing' facial recognition tech rolled out by cops to tackle shoplifters
A “game-changing” facial recognition technology is targeting prolific retail criminals, including shoplifters.
Twelve leading firms were approached for a police pilot scheme and asked to provide images of their worst unidentified offenders. Within 60 seconds, the technology generates a match report for an officer – who can determine whether to make an arrest. Of the images supplied, 302 were suitable to use in the scheme and 149 matched shots from the Metropolitan Police, custody image database.
Lindsey Chiswick, director of intelligence, said: “From a policing perspective, facial recognition is absolutely game-changing. “We’ve been using it for a while in the post-incidence sense, but it’s only recently in the last year or so that the algorithms have really come along and it’s really accurate now.
“We can use it to point our resource at the most wanted, who have committed the most prolific offending and that ability to prioritise is really key at a time when our resources are spread quite thinly.” Instead of taking into account characteristics such as whether a person is male or female or dark or light-skinned, the biometric tool calculates the individual measurements of people’s faces.
Theft costs retail industry an estimated £1.9 billion a year (Getty Images/iStockphoto)It then creates a template, comparing this to the same biometric template that was created in the custody image database when the person was arrested in the past. Within 60 seconds, from the image being inputted into the system, the technology will generate a match report for a police officer to look at manually before determining whether to make an arrest.
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Images can come from CCTV stills or smartphone footage. The technology is so sophisticated, it managed to find an accurate match from a grainy image where the person pictured was wearing a mask. Ms Chiswick added: “If we didn’t have this, the alternative would be an individual sitting and manually looking and comparing that picture with the other ones, which could take weeks or months.”
As part of our ongoing Clamp Down on Shoplifting Campaign, The Mirror is calling for police to investigate all incidents, including those which involve the thefts of goods worth less than £200. This was downgraded to a minor offence usually punished by a £70 postal fine in 2014 under Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May.
Kyle Gordon, commander frontline policing with responsibility for business and retail crime at the Met said while the force does not have a threshold of the value of items stolen when investigating thefts, he expects the new facial recognition technology to be deployed for the most harmful incidents in shops, such as assaults and hate crime.
Mirror campaignRetail crime is responsible for the loss of an estimated £1.9 billion in the UK every year according to the Met. Commander Gordon added: “The people who commit crimes in shops are often committing crimes elsewhere. We know that because [these 149 offenders] have been matched against the systems we already have, these are people who have committed other crimes and we’ve had dealings with them in the past. So, we are confident that we will progress a number of these.”
Recent figures also showed 60% of retail workers fear being abused or assaulted at their workplace. At the recent Labour Conference, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said her party would look to make the assault of a shop worker a separate offence, as it is in Scotland.
The Mirror’s campaign, publicly supported by retail workers’ union Usdaw, as well as major firms John Lewis, Co-op and Nisa, is also calling for a restoration in the number of Police Community Support Officers to patrol high street. We are also asking for the underlying causes of shoplifting to be addressed, such as tackling the cost-of-living crisis partially blamed for the increase in retail crime.
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