WA Police Facial Recognition Trial Scans 1.38 Million Faces, Leads to 122 Arrests

A five-month trial of real-time facial recognition technology by Western Australia Police scanned 1,380,882 faces across 43 locations, resulting in 122 arrests and nine incorrect alerts. The deployments, which concluded on Saturday, involved surveillance vans in both metropolitan and regional areas, and led officers to engage with 146 registered sex offenders. The trial, which ran for 100 deployments, highlights the growing use of biometric surveillance in Australian law enforcement, raising questions about privacy and accuracy. With a false alert rate of less than 1%, police tout the technology's effectiveness, but civil liberties advocates may scrutinize the scale and oversight of such systems. As agencies nationwide watch WA's results, the trial could shape future policy on facial recognition in public spaces.