The Metropolitan Police plans to use facial recognition technology going forward to try to identify and arrest London’s most prolific shoplifters.
The Met wrote to 12 leading London retailers asking for CCTV images of their top 30 unidentified offenders.
Retail crime is responsible for the loss of an estimated £1.9bn in revenue in the UK each year, causing more than 1,000 reported cases of abuse and violence against staff annually, the Met say.However, Rob Blackie, Liberal Democrat mayoral candidate, has labelled the rollout as “worrying” as the technology “has such a high error rate for ethnic minorities”.
The Conservative mayoral candidate, Susan Hall, called it an “important step forward” but said the Met needed to “go much further to crack down on crimes like these in London” and added that, if elected, she would “set up specialist units within the Met focused specifically on tackling burglaries, robberies and thefts”.
“The use of facial recognition technology - which is retrospective not live - is one tool in a much larger package of measures being used by the police to bear down on retail crime and violence against shop-workers and help make London safer for everyone.”
Earlier this year, the Met began to use the technology to arrest dangerous and predatory offenders of violence against women and girls.
The original article contains 548 words, the summary contains 216 words. Saved 61%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Metropolitan Police plans to use facial recognition technology going forward to try to identify and arrest London’s most prolific shoplifters.
The Met wrote to 12 leading London retailers asking for CCTV images of their top 30 unidentified offenders.
Retail crime is responsible for the loss of an estimated £1.9bn in revenue in the UK each year, causing more than 1,000 reported cases of abuse and violence against staff annually, the Met say.However, Rob Blackie, Liberal Democrat mayoral candidate, has labelled the rollout as “worrying” as the technology “has such a high error rate for ethnic minorities”.
The Conservative mayoral candidate, Susan Hall, called it an “important step forward” but said the Met needed to “go much further to crack down on crimes like these in London” and added that, if elected, she would “set up specialist units within the Met focused specifically on tackling burglaries, robberies and thefts”.
“The use of facial recognition technology - which is retrospective not live - is one tool in a much larger package of measures being used by the police to bear down on retail crime and violence against shop-workers and help make London safer for everyone.”
Earlier this year, the Met began to use the technology to arrest dangerous and predatory offenders of violence against women and girls.
The original article contains 548 words, the summary contains 216 words. Saved 61%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!