On June 22, Western Australian police became the nation’s first law enforcement agency to use live facial recognition technology to find persons of interest.

The trial involves a clearly marked van with cameras driving around Perth and Mandurah. It scans the faces of everyone it passes, comparing them against a watchlist of about 4,000 people. It includes those with outstanding arrest warrants, reportable offenders, people subject to lawful exclusion orders, and missing persons.

The exercise is overt and widely publicized, with the dates of deployments posted in advance.

In its first week, media reports put the trial at more than 130,000 faces scanned and 33 alerts. It led to 18 arrests, along with engagements with registered sex offenders. Work that would have taken weeks of conventional investigative effort has been done in days by a single van.

But harder questions surround its governance. Can we really call it a “trial”? Who gets to authorize such deployments? And who checks the safeguards?

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