Facial recognition tools, bulking police budgets to address unruly shoplifting behaviours in the UK and Wales, will arm stores with more than just CCTV footage to secure prosecutions.
The government confirmed it was securing a massive investment to maintain integrity in the high-street and protect businesses. £4 million of the £55 million allocation over 4 years will go towards funding mobile units that search and scan crowded city centres with facial recognition.
Stores are frequented by shoplifters so the punishment must be greater on those that severely affect the availability of stores opening, stock levels and profitability.
Facial recognition surveillance, in this context, can help identify offenders from moving or still images matched with results from past convictions held in a secure police database.
In addition, a new stand-alone criminal offence tackles assaults against retail workers. Perpetrators will have to face tougher sanctions and this includes a prison sentence for up to 6 months and unlimited fines currently being passed through Parliament.
Mobile units will only cut £4M into the overall budget.
Project Pegasus has also been engineered to fight the epidemic of shoplifting. Big name retailers have captured CCTV footage to run through police-held databases with offender records, using facial recognition.
Some critics have lamented the plans, arguing that it wastes a colossal amount of public money and doesn’t fix a broken police system, the Financial Times reported. Silkie Carlo, Director of Civil Liberties at Big Brother Watch also believes that mass public surveillance should not be condoned to tackle the issue. Nonetheless, the public announcement of £240m police funding, broken down for various police activities, at least doesn’t indicate further service cuts.
