Madeleine Stone from Big Brother Watch has condemned the UK's first permanent facial recognition cameras as "Orwellian" and "authoritarian" following their installation in Croydon, South London.
The Big Brother Watch representative told GB News the technology turns Londoners into "walking barcodes" and represents a "catastrophic" threat to civil liberties.
The comments come after the Metropolitan Police installed the UK's first permanent facial recognition cameras in Croydon, South London.
The cameras will scan for wanted criminals walking by as part of a project that could eventually extend across the capital.
Madeleine Stone blasted the facial recognition as "dystopian"
GB NEWS
Set to begin operating in June or July 2025, the technology will capture faces of people on the street to identify alleged rapists, burglars, robbers and other criminals.
The system will match faces against images in the police database and alert officers if there is a match.
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Stone told GB News: "I've lived in South London for 30 years and I think everyone can agree that policing in London is broken.
"They're not responding to 999 calls. They're not investigating crimes. But it's absolutely not an either or situation where the only solution has to be reaching for this dystopian, Orwellian technology.
"There are other things available to police forces that they should be doing long before they start reaching for some of the most authoritarian surveillance tools that we've seen.
"As I've said, other democratic countries do their policing without this kind of technology, the kind of countries that we're following in the footsteps of are places like Russia and China.
"I don't think as much as we want to fight crime, there are other ways that don't involve violating the rights and civil liberties of everyone in London."
The new cameras will be positioned on existing lampposts or attached to buildings in North End and London Road.
They will only operate when officers are nearby and ready to respond to database matches. According to the Metropolitan Police, the data is immediately deleted if there is no match.
The force has previously claimed the technology does not exhibit the same racial bias as found in other forms of facial recognition.
The Metropolitan Police deploying the use of live facial recognition technology in CroydonPAThe system has already proven effective in its mobile form, with the Met reporting thousands of arrests from van-mounted cameras, including at least two rapists in the last year.
Mitch Carr, the Met's neighbourhood policing superintendent for south London, wrote to local community figures earlier this month announcing the move.
"I am currently working with the central team to install fixed LFR cameras in Croydon town centre," he said.
Carr explained the technology would become "far more embedded as a 'business as usual' approach" rather than relying on mobile units.
"The end result will see cameras covering a defined area and will give us much more flexibility around the days and times we can run the operations," he added.
The cameras will only be switched on when officers are deployed and ready to respond to alerts.
