Force slammed for racism, misogyny and homophobia, which serves police state and is stitching up anti-genocide protesters will soon be able to spy on you across the capital. What could go wrong?
The Metropolitan Police Service is installing an unprecedented permanent network of fixed live facial recognition cameras in London, beginning with Croydon but undoubtedly with a view to similar installations across London. The move comes just after South Wales Police installed the first ever temporary city-wide facial recognition network in Cardiff for sporting events last month.
Privacy advocacy group Big Brother Watch described the “hugely intrusive mass surveillance” move as marking “a seismic shift away from mobile facial recognition vans” – supposed ‘trials’ which already impinged heavily on privacy and freedom of movement – and “an alarming escalation into a dystopian nightmare” without any debate by MPs or legislative oversight.
The group points out that:
There is no specific legislation mentioning live facial recognition in the UK. The police are writing their own rules when it comes to expanding this Orwellian technology.
This net of facial recognition surveillance could be extended beyond Croydon, and capture all of London, as well as other cities across the UK, if we don’t fight back together.
The Met has been found to be institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic, targeting minorities for oppressive and even violent policing – and has recently smeared peaceful anti-genocide protesters, many of them Jewish, claiming they ‘forced’ their way through police lines when abundant video evidence shows the police told them to come through.
Big Brother Watch is supporting Europe’s first legal action against police and private use of facial recognition on behalf of innocent members of the public who were wrongly flagged as criminals by facial recognition systems and threatened with arrest.
Unlike the EU, which now bans police from using live facial recognition except in a few extreme situations and requires a judge’s approval, or for that matter any other democracy – the UK has no laws on its use, allowing police – and control-freak Keir Starmer’s authoritarian government – to act with impunity and without restrictions.
In the hands of such a police-state inclined government – which is already abusing terrorism laws and legal process in a ‘lawfare’ assault on freedoms of assembly and protest – and a police force with the Met’s record, the untrammelled use of live facial recognition is an extreme danger to civil liberties, due process and democracy, even more so when it is installed permanently.
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And Reeves is giving them MORE money for this? I thought we were stoney broke. Here’s a revolutionary idea – get their fat arses out on the beat and not stuck behind computer screens and steering wheels of high-end BMWs.
IN our local town where we moved over six years ago, I haven’t seen a policeman patrolling the streets once. Though they did stop their car a few months ago to ask me where “X” Lane was, only for me to tell them, they were parked on it!” Good local knowledge there eh? Hopefully it wasn’t a life-and-death emergency!
You can always find our local plod at the bakery/deli counter of the local supermarket(s).
…Where you’re filmed from arrival to leaving the grounds, nevermind the premises.
And I’ll bet the cameras they have in your face at the self-service checkouts were put there because the fat bastards were paying for a carrot when they
thieving‘buying’ a tray of donuts.https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.sky.com/story/amp/police-officer-sacked-for-scanning-7p-carrots-barcode-to-pay-for-10-box-of-doughnuts-12142999
We’re the most cctv’d nation on the planet – but strangely we’re not N. Korea.
You can imagine the canteen culture in the local station …. “Have you seen this piece of skirt?”
And then, of course, there are the myriad youtube examples of plod acting like the cnuts they are when the cameras are on them – in both private residences and public spaces.
Thank Teresa for that mass sackings of our police force ambulance NHS fire brigade the list is endless but now we can go out and someone in a TV room can say look it’s Mrs Davies little boy ouch