The national police service in Ireland has received the go-ahead to upgrade their biometric tools and harness AI to analyse the gait and voice of offenders.
Powers of the Gardai force now include harnessing facial recognition and analysing physiological characteristics against recorded images to build the full picture of an offender’s identity during a criminal investigation. Facial recognition, and now further recognition of individual characteristics, can be used to identify missing people and serious suspects from CCTV images. As of yet, legislation has not passed the use of real-time use of biometric tools for police searches.
The government has indicated they will legislate other types of biometric data in criminal investigations, which could include physical, physiological or behavioural characteristics of an individual. As the technology advances, law enforcement will also be able to utilize tools which identify suspects by other unique appearance markers. There will still be surveillance of these new technologies to ensure they uphold privacy standards and produce accurate matches. At the moment, gardaí can spend months trawling hours of CCTV footage of offenders where AI could be a more accurate substitute.
“Biometric technologies will help An Garda Síochána carry out investigations quickly and efficiently and will save valuable Garda time. It will prove to be of particular assistance where time is of the essence in order to preserve a person from a threat of serious harm or a threat to their life or the lives of others.”
