Facial recognition vans launched in Southampton in hopes to tackle crime
Live facial recognition vans have hit the streets of Hampshire for the first time
Live facial recognition vans have been launched in Southampton today.
The two new vans are being deployed across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight with the aim of the technology being to target priority suspects known to the area.
Launching as part of the city centre's Operation Predict patrols, they aim to help tackle shop-lifting and anti-social behaviour in the city.
Alex Charge, Superintendent and District Commander for Southampton, said: "Our goal as policing is about crime fighting, so we use them so that we can identify people who are wanted or people who are going to cause harm.
"It's a really effective and efficient bit of technology that we've been provided with and in policing, we would call our police officers who are able to identify lots of people and make lots of arrests, our thief takers.
"This is a technological thief taker.
"It can identify people we might want to talk to, which doesn't necessarily mean an arrest, but it might identify people really quickly, and obviously it can sit here and scan large crowds and pick out those people."
The vans will be clearly marked, with posters and leaflets being handed out in the area, notifying people of the operation and how it works.
The police say facial recognition can scan crowds to identify subjects at a rate and level of accuracy that can't be replicated by officers on the ground.
Any alerts that show up are verified by a specialist trained operator and assigned to officers on the ground to assess the information and consider next steps.
Superintendent Charge is telling us what happens.
He said: "What we'll do is we'll deploy the van, we'll give people prior notice, so it's no surprise approach because we're not trying to be sneaky and catch people out.
"It's deployed together with my local police officers and then what effectively happens is when you see an indication on the screen, it'll indicate what we think we need to speak to them for then officers will go forward and they will speak to those individuals.
"They'll then ascertain why we need to speak to them, sometimes that'll end up in arrest, sometimes it'll just be us getting their details, there's all sorts of options."