UK police slammed for face recognition trial cost
23 January 2019 17:00 GMT


A freedom of information request by The Independent showed that the trials costs over £200,000 ($260,000).

However, the six deployments by the Metropolitan Police resulted in only two people being stopped, and then released.

The newspaper's investigation found that the Metropolitan Police spent £198,000 on automatic facial recognition software between the 2015-16 and 2017-18 financial years.

In the same period, it paid £23,800 for hardware, including the cameras used to record people’s faces.

On top of the total spend of £222,000, the force has paid for uniformed and undercover police officers at each deployment but said the cost could not be precisely calculated.