Police Defend Use Of Facial Recognition At Carnival After Worries Of Bias | Philip Ingram

Our Take

Credit to TalkTV and host Philip Ingram for putting this conversation on camera, because the argument Festus Akinbusoye makes here is the exact playbook we expect to see stateside. A 1% false positive rate sounds reassuring until you remember that number is applied against tens of thousands of faces scanned at a single event, and every one of those false matches is a real person stopped, questioned, or flagged by an officer because an algorithm guessed wrong. 'Improved accuracy' has been the industry's answer to bias concerns for years, and it's always presented as the moment the technology finally earned public trust — right before the next controversy.

What's really being normalized here is the idea that mass biometric scanning at a public gathering is just routine policing, not surveillance. That's the same rhetorical move Flock Safety and its ALPR network use in the US: frame blanket monitoring of people who've done nothing wrong as a narrow tool aimed only at 'wanted individuals,' while the actual dragnet captures everyone who shows up. Once a city accepts that framing for a carnival, a stadium, or a protest, the technology doesn't stay narrow — it expands, gets networked, and gets shared across agencies with far less scrutiny than it got on day one.

Facial recognition and ALPR are different technologies but the same fight: unaccountable, always-on tracking of ordinary people sold as a public safety upgrade. If you want to know what's already watching your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you want to push back before it spreads further, our take-action page has concrete next steps.