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Police Scotland warned not to roll out facial recognition cameras without Holyrood approval

- BY DAN VEVERS Chief Reporter

POLICE Scotland has been warned not to roll out “Orwellian’’ live facial recognition cameras without Holyrood approval.

It comes as the Sunday Mail has learned Scots police chiefs went on a fact-finding mission to London last month to learn how the controversial AI-based tech has been deployed.

Scottish Police Authority chair Fiona McQueen, who visited officials at the Metropolitan Police on November 16, praised the London force's “thoughtful” use of the technology, which has oversight from Mayor Sadiq Khan’s office.

Officers in the English capital claim it has made communities safer and say out of 1000 arrests using the tech, there had only been 10 false positives.

However, the Met's use of live facial recognition (LFR) is being challenged in court by civil liberties groups over claims its breaches human rights laws and fears it opens the door to “mass surveillance”.

Jasleen Chaggar, legal and policy officer at Big Brother Watch, said: "It beggars belief that the Met Police - who are currently fighting a legal challenge against their use of live facial recognition - are encouraging Police Scotland to follow their Orwellian practices like lemmings off a cliff. To suggest that the public should be willing to accept live facial recognition misidentifying 10 innocent members of the public, who could then be detained and questioned by the police, is alarming - particularly when 80 per cent of those wrongly identified were black people.