Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick has called critics of facial recognition technology "ill-informed" and defended its use by police officers despite privacy concerns.
Campaign groups including Big Brother Watch have said that the controversial technology infringes on the civil liberties of individuals and can wrongly flag up innocent people as wanted criminal suspects.
Big Brother Watch has branded the technology "a highly controversial mass surveillance tool with an unprecedented failure rate [of] 93 per cent”, but Dame Cressida insists that any privacy concerns surrounding its use are exaggerated.
She said: "In an age of Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, concern about my image and that of my fellow law-abiding citizens passing through [facial recognition] and not being stored, feels much, much smaller than my and the public's vital expectation to be kept safe from a knife through the chest.”
Speaking at the launch of a report by the Royal United Services Institute scrutinising the use of data and algorithms by police forces in England and Wales, Dame Cressida argued that eight criminals had already been caught using technology, adding that critics should "justify to the victims of those crimes why police should not be allowed to use tech to catch criminals".
The Metropolitan Police Force claims that facial recognition cameras can correctly identify 70 per cent of suspects who come into contact with it, following its own tests.
Dame Cressida said: "If an algorithm can help identify, in our criminal intelligence systems material, a potential serial rapist or killer... then I think almost all citizens would want us to use it.
"The only people who benefit from us not using [it] lawfully and proportionately are the criminals, the rapists, the terrorists and all those who want to harm you, your family and friends."
However, an independent review suggests that during testing of the technology, only 19 per cent of matches flagged up by the technology were accurate, so controversies remain.
