Artificial intelligence in policing: Why facial recognition is proving controversial | ITV News
The short version: ITV News examines the Met's facial recognition push in London, and the same 'trust us, it works' argument is exactly what Flock Safety tells American cities about ALPRs.
Our Take
Credit to ITV News for laying out both sides plainly: the Metropolitan Police touting hundreds of arrests from facial recognition, and campaigners countering that it functions as a dragnet — scanning everyone to catch a few, with error rates and misidentifications falling hardest on people who did nothing wrong. That's not a UK-only story. It's the same script Flock Safety and local police departments run here every time a city council asks whether ALPR cameras actually reduce crime or just quietly log where every car in town goes, every day, forever.
The pattern is familiar: a vendor or agency cites a headline arrest number, skips the base rate of scans that led nowhere, and never quite answers what happens to the data on the innocent majority. Facial recognition and license plate readers are cousins in the same surveillance family — both marketed as narrow tools for catching bad guys, both quietly built into infrastructure that watches everyone by default. Once that infrastructure exists, mission creep isn't a hypothetical, it's a business model.
If you want to know how close this same debate is to your own street, check our camera map to see documented Flock deployments near you, and if you're ready to push back at a city council meeting or public records request, our take-action guide has the tools to start.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of ITV News, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.