Use of Facial Recognition Technology
Date of request: 8 April 2025
Reference: 490-25
Request
I write to request information and records under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA), regarding the use of facial recognition technology.
Questions 1-6 relate to the period from January 2023 to present.
1/ Has Avon and Somerset Constabulary deployed live facial recognition?1a/Please provide dates and locations for each deployment.
2/ Has Avon and Somerset Constabulary used any form of retrospective facial recognition?
2a/ Please specify whether this is via the Police National Database (PND), any other database, or a combination.
2b/ If any database other than the PND was accessed for the purposes of retrospective facial recognition, please specify the database(s) and the number of searches that have been conducted.
3/ Has Avon and Somerset Constabulary deployed operator initiated facial recognition
3a/ please provide dates and locations for each deployment.
4/ Has Avon and Somerset Constabulary deployed any form of facial recognition in conjunction with body-worn video?
4a/ Please provide dates and locations for each deployment.
5/ Where live facial recognition has been used:
a/How many individuals were on the watchlist used in each instance?
b/How many of those on the watchlist were not wanted for arrest in each instance?
c/For what reasons were these people included?
6/At each deployment, how many alerts were generated?
a/How many of these were true alerts (confirmed and unconfirmed) and how many were false alerts (confirmed and unconfirmed)?
b/Please provide the engagement outcomes for each deployment, showing how many resulted in arrest, other disposal, or no action.
7/Does Avon and Somerset Constabulary plan to deploy live facial recognition?
a/If so, please specify dates and locations of any planned trials or deployments.
8/Does Avon and Somerset Constabulary plan to deploy operator initiated facial recognition?
a/If so, please specify dates and locations of any planned trials or deployments.
9/Please provide any internal policy document, guidelines or legal basis governing Avon and Somerset Constabulary’s use of facial recognition technology, including any Data Protection Impact Assessment.
Response
Avon and Somerset Police holds information on those of your questions that relate to retrospective facial recognition technology. However, we will not be able to answer your request without exceeding the appropriate limit. This is because the information requested in question 4 a) is not centrally recorded and would involve an extensive search of our files to find and collate.
I can confirm that Avon and Somerset Police have deployed retrospective facial recognition (RFR) in conjunction with body-worn video, in the context of incidents of disorder, making use of the Police National Database (PND). However, we do not have a central record of all dates and locations for its deployment in this context, nor any means of retrieving this information via an electronic search. To identify all dates and locations for deployments of RFR within the scope of this question, a manual review of our records would be required, which we estimate would take more than 18 hours to complete.
Section 12 of the Act makes provision for public authorities to refuse requests for information where the cost of dealing with them would exceed the appropriate limit, which for police authorities is set at £450 or 18 staff hours. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 2.5 working days in determining whether the department holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting it.
This letter represents a Refusal Notice under the Act.
To assist further, I can confirm that no information is held in relation to those of your questions that relate to Live Facial Recognition (LFR) and Operator Initiated Facial Recognition (OIFR).
Finally, please accept my apologies for the delay in providing this response. Given the refusal notice provided under Section 12(1), the extension to consider a qualified exemption was incorrectly applied.