Concerns raised over proposed AI surveillance system

A surveillance system with the capacity for facial recognition is due to be installed in Central St Leonards, raising questions over whether more adequate public consultation should have been carried out. Emma Harwood reports.

It will be owned and operated by the Business Crime Reduction Partnership (BCRP), a neighbourhood watch scheme for businesses led by representatives of the council, police and Business Improvement District (Love Hastings).

It is being paid for from the Home Office Safer Streets Fund, which awarded Hastings Borough Council £450,000 to tackle burglary and theft through measures such as improved street lighting and CCTV last summer, and the cash needs to be spent by the end of this financial year.

But some residents and business owners have written to MP Sally-Ann Hart and Police Crime Commissioner Katy Bourne, who bid for the funding, asking for a  rethink amidst concern it might infringe on privacy, deter visitors or unnecessarily  target innocent and vulnerable people.

The network video recorder (NVR) system will provide 24-hour surveillance and security lighting in residential and commercial areas, with 37 high definition digital video cameras, but it is embedded with “industry-leading deep-learning algorithms,” including facial recognition technology with the ability to identify gender or ethnicity.

Moreover, it is manufactured by Hikvision, a Chinese security firm whose technology is helping to establish an oppressive surveillance state in the Xinjiang region of China, where the Uighur ethnic minorities have been held in secret internment camps.

“Facial recognition will not be used”

The BCRP says “it will not be linked to any local or national databases for data matching and facial recognition will only be used to allow the system to differentiate an actual human face from anything else moving in the field of view. It will not have the ability to match that face to a human identity.

“Each camera will have the ability to block out sections of the field of view to protect domestic privacy and domestic locations. An example of this would be blocking out the windows of private domestic residents.”

However, it will use artificial intelligence to allow “automated notification of people loitering in specific areas, unusual behaviour or vehicle movements.”

“A lack of engagement and transparency”

Sam Kinch, involved with community engagement on the project, said: “No formal public consultation has taken place and they’re moving to get the hardware on Friday (12 February), so no consultation will take place.

“They say they won’t be using that functionality but what would they need to do, if at a later stage they wanted to start using it – they wouldn’t need to notify the public, presumably, because the hardware is already installed. You can get networked video recording systems which don’t have that functionality, why would you buy it if you don’t intend to use it?”

Consultation

John Bownas, of the BCRP, said businesses and residents had been surveyed last October and that the ‘vast majority’ were in favour of improved CCTV and that the Hikvision system was an effective and secure one used in high streets around the country.

“If we downgraded the system to one which doesn’t use facial recognition it wouldn’t perform other functions either, so then we’re not getting value for money”.

Mr Bownas said as far as he understood there is no statutory obligation to carry out a formal public consultation before installing CCTV.

No single piece of legislation regulating CCTV surveillance

Regulation of CCTV surveillance is covered by a range of different acts including the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, the General Data Protection Regulation, the Data Protection Act 2018, the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Private organisations are expected to follow a code of practice set out by the Information Commissioner’s Office. Meanwhile, the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice 2013 gives guidance to local authorities and police. A further code of practice on live facial recognition technology was published in December 2020, in response to a landmark court ruling in August that South Wales Police Force had breached privacy and equality laws in using the technology.

Is CCTV the best way to prevent acquisitive crime?

In St Leonards, some business owners question whether a high tech CCTV system is the best use of the funding. Seafront cafe Goat Ledge was broken into several weeks ago but while footage of suspects was captured on existing CCTV, no one has yet been arrested. “We had dummy cameras and ‘Smile you’re on CCTV’ signs up for many years, and plenty of criminal incidents still took place”, said co-owner Will Stevens.

“When consulted about the new system, we felt uneasy about footage of our business premises being channelled to an undisclosed, potentially unaccountable body. If Home Office money is being put forward to improve St Leonards, there are lots of projects that would, in my opinion, be more constructive and appropriate to a town like this than state-of-the-art facial recognition technology.

“And I’m sure that if the proposed subjects of this surveillance, the community, were consulted, they too would also have plenty of good ideas”.

A spokesperson for PCC Katy Bourne said the decision over how to spend the funding was up to Hastings Borough Council and the Business Crime Reduction Partnership.

Learn more about the Hastings Business Crime Reduction Partnership.
Read the CCTV code of practice by the Information Commissioner’s Office.
Good practice and guidance for Police by the Surveillance Camera Commissioner’s Office.

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