Rights vs security & privacy
Should Police Use Facial Recognition Technology?
LNAT Section B · Model essay
The essay prompt
Should the police be allowed to use facial recognition technology to identify people in public? Set out the arguments on each side and reach a reasoned conclusion.
The stance
The police should be permitted to use facial recognition, but only inside a binding statutory framework: live identification of crowds in public spaces should be barred save for narrow, court-authorised exceptions, while tightly governed retrospective searches remain available. The real question is not whether police may use it, but on what terms; unregulated deployment is indefensible.
The case for
It is a powerful tool against serious crime when targeted.
Used retrospectively against a known image, FRT can identify suspects in terrorism, trafficking and serious violence far faster than manual review of footage. The EU's own AI Act, which bans most live use, still preserves exceptions precisely for finding trafficking victims, missing people and terror suspects, conceding that there are cases where the public-safety value is real and worth keeping.
The case against
Live FRT in public engages privacy in a way CCTV does not.
An ordinary camera records; FRT identifies. It converts a crowd into a set of database queries, scalable, searchable and persistent. In R (Bridges) the Court of Appeal held that South Wales Police's live deployment engaged Article 8 of the Convention and was unlawful because the rules left too much to officers' discretion. The qualitative leap, not the camera, is the problem.
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