WA Police Live Facial Recognition Trial Raises Privacy Governance Concerns
Western Australian police deployed a live facial recognition system in a clearly marked van scanning faces in Perth and Mandurah against a watchlist of 4,000 people, leading to 18 arrests in its first week. Critics raised concerns about inadequate governance, unclear error rates, potential bias against women and people with darker skin, and the absence of independent evaluation or disclosed safeguards.
What happened
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, scanning faces of everyone it passes against a watchlist of about 4,000 people including those with outstanding arrest warrants, reportable offenders, people subject to lawful exclusion orders, and missing persons.
In its first week, the trial scanned more than 130,000 faces and generated 33 alerts, leading to 18 arrests and engagements with registered sex offenders. WA police told media it recorded just one false positive, a rate of 0.0008%, though other reports stated two errors. Measured against the 33 alerts, the same data gives a much higher error rate of 3–6%.
Reported impact
No official breakdown of alerts has been released, nor any comparison with conventional policing over the same period. What remains undisclosed is the human cost – any innocent people the system might misidentify and send officers to stop, question or detain.
Facial recognition algorithms have well-documented biases producing higher false-match rates for women, younger people, and people with darker skin. In a policing context, this raises the risk of wrongful stops for those groups.
Index analysis
WA police both runs the deployment and compiles the results it publishes, and no independent evaluator has been named. Its own privacy impact assessment says funding is not yet determined and lists event security among the intended uses.
Arrests are an incomplete measure of success, because everyone arrested was already wanted – these are not crimes solved, but simply a known watchlist being worked through more quickly. An arrest count only records the hits, not the misses.
Governance controls
Any trial of new technology requires success criteria defined in advance, independent evaluation, and the possibility the technology will not be deployed on a permanent basis after the trial completes. That does not appear to be happening in WA.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.