By Maraam Nusair and Victoria Brustad

Police have arrested more than a dozen people in Croydon using controversial live facial recognition surveillance that has been placed across several areas in London. 

The cameras work by scanning people’s faces as they walk past, creating a faceprint that gets streamed and monitored by police on the scene for a match to images of wanted criminals previously uploaded into the database. 

The widened use of this surveillance technology has received backlash from the Big Brother Watch organisation which called it a “dangerously authoritarian surveillance”. The House of Lord’s Justice and Home Affairs Committee have acknowledged this as a valuable tool in catching criminals but stated it is “deeply concerned” over the expansion of such tools without proper scrutiny and accountability. 

The question of whether the police should be able to deploy this level of surveillance in public without prior consent to aid in catching criminals has been raised. 

Eastlondonlines went out onto the streets of Croydon to ask locals for their opinion.