Police facial recognition cameras return to the streets of Brixton, Friday 27th Feb 2026
The police have once again installed Live Facial Recognition cameras in the heart of Brixton, with a van parked directly outside the tube station this evening. This time they’ve placed …
Black News 
The police have once again installed Live Facial Recognition cameras in the heart of Brixton, with a van parked directly outside the tube station this evening.
This time they’ve placed new cameras some distance away from the van.
The first time we observed the police employing live facial recognition was back in August 2025, with the force claiming that the operation had been a “great success with 17 arrests and 23 alerts.”
The controversial technology works by matching the faces of people within the range of special cameras to images of people on a watchlist.
It does this by ‘mapping’ the distinct points of faces and allocating a numbered code to that map. It then compares that code to the codes assigned to faces on the watchlist.
However, human rights group Liberty point out that “watchlists can contain pictures of anyone, including people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing, and the images used can come from anywhere – even from our social media accounts.”
They added:
It’s been used at the football, the rugby and Formula 1, at music festivals, and even at the seaside. It’s been used as a tool of intimidation at protests.
And it’s being used in shops with information passed to the police to track down people forced to shoplift during a cost-of-living crisis.
And there simply isn’t any telling how and when police are using retroactive facial recognition to identify countless people in any image or footage they hold.
