Agenda, decisions and minutes

RESOLVED

That Cllr Shrivastava be elected Chair and Cllr Best be elected Vice-Chair for the municipal year.  

RESOLVED

That Cllr Shrivastava be elected Chair and Cllr Best be elected Vice-Chair for the municipal year. 

RESOLVED

That the minutes of the meeting held on 13 March 2024 be agreed as an accurate record.

RESOLVED

That the minutes of the meeting held on 13 March 2024 be agreed as an accurate record.

RESOLVED

That the following declaration be noted:

·         Cllr Davis declared that she worked in this policy area and the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime and Violence Reduction Unit were clients of hers.

RESOLVED

That the following declaration be noted:

·         Cllr Davis declared that she worked in this policy area and the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime and Violence Reduction Unit were clients of hers.

There are none.

RESOLVED

1.    To recommend that the Council work with the Police to ensure residents and stakeholders are promptly and sufficiently informed of developments in how Live Facial Recognition technology is used and of local deployments of the technology.

2.    That the Committee coordinate with the Cabinet Member for Refugees, Safer Communities and Equalities, Safer Communities Service and Safer Neighbourhoods Board to engage with the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime regarding the use and monitoring of Live Facial Recognition technology, particularly the monitoring of demographic data.

Witnesses

James Lee, Director of Communities, Partnerships and Leisure
Emmanuelle Andrews, Policy and Campaigns Manager – Liberty
Acting Chief Inspector Duncan Jackson, Metropolitan Police Service
Rosemarie Ramsay, Chair – Safer Neighbourhoods Board

Key points from discussion

Emmanuelle Andrews addressed the Committee. Key points included:

5.1.       Live Facial Recognition (LFR) was a form of biometric surveillance. Its output was a probability that someone passing through the zone of recognition was a person on a watchlist; the term ‘match’ could be misleading.

5.2.         Liberty’s view was that common law policing powers and the Data Protection Act 2018 were an insufficient legal basis for police use of LFR. How and when LFR was used was not expressly regulated by legislation: a combination of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, the Human Rights Act 1998, the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 and Data Protection Act 2018 were usually relied on but had been omitted from the report submitted to the Committee by the Metropolitan Police Service (the ‘Police’).

5.3.         The Court of Appeal, in Bridges, found fundamental deficiencies in the legal framework as LFR was a novel technology – not akin to taking photographs or CCTV – which involved the capturing and automated processing of the sensitive personal data from a large number of people, the vast majority of whom would be of no interest to the police.

5.4.         The Court had two main areas of concern regarding the legal framework: who could be put on a watchlist and where LFR could be used. In both regards, it found that too much discretion was left to individual police officers.

5.5.         Liberty’s view was that police policies and practices which had been updated since Bridges were still unlikely to meet the threshold set by the judgement, with too much discretion afforded still being in respect of how, when and where LFR was used. Liberty had found the sources of watchlist images and the reasons for which people could be include in watchlists to be too broad in relation to the Bridges judgement.

5.6.         There was a lack of clarity regarding what happened to CCTV footage from LFR deployments. There was scope for that footage to be subject to other forms of facial recognition or used to populate future watchlists.

5.7.         The size of recent watchlists – up to 14,000 images – made it easy for police forces to satisfy the Bridges requirement that a proposed deployment location be one at which it was suspected on reasonable grounds that one or more persons on the watchlist.

5.8.         Liberty’s own experience of witnessing deployments indicated that the police’s apparent safeguards were rarely implemented in practice. For example, people who sought to avoid cameras were treated with suspicion.

5.9.         The debate regarding LFR had been reduced to one about safeguards and policy. However, Liberty’s view was that only a complete ban would be sufficient as the use of facial recognition as a mass surveillance tool significantly altered the power balance between the  ...  view the full minutes text for item 5.

RESOLVED
That the draft work programme at appendix D be agreed with the following amendments:

·         Cultural Strategy Implementation to be a written update for information only;

·         Community Assets Policy to be added for pre-decision scrutiny in September;

·         Main Grants to be added for pre-decision scrutiny in November;

·         Libraries review and strategy to be added for pre-decision scrutiny in November;

·         ‘PSPO review’ to be retitled ‘Tackling anti-social behaviour and PSPO update’;

·         ‘Police-community engagement’ to be retitled ‘Police-community engagement and tackling crime update’ and scheduled for January; and

·         Local assemblies to be added for pre-decision scrutiny in March.

RESOLVED
That the draft work programme at appendix D be agreed with the following amendments:

·         Cultural Strategy Implementation to be a written update for information only;

·         Community Assets Policy to be added for pre-decision scrutiny in September;

·         Main Grants to be added for pre-decision scrutiny in November;

·         Libraries review and strategy to be added for pre-decision scrutiny in November;

·         ‘PSPO review’ to be retitled ‘Tackling anti-social behaviour and PSPO update’;

·         ‘Police-community engagement’ to be retitled ‘Police-community engagement and tackling crime update’ and scheduled for January; and

·         Local assemblies to be added for pre-decision scrutiny in March.