TL;DR

The UK’s police number-plate camera network now has an AI tool that searches every recorded journey for suspicious patterns, and it is being upgraded for wider use. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) reported on 6 November that Faculty AI, a London company, has won a half-million-pound contract to extend it to “other crime types” with a view to “future national adoption”. The US has seen a midterm backlash against similar cameras. In the UK, scrutiny has been minimal.

The network and the tool

TBIJ puts the national Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) system at around 12,000 fixed and almost 2,000 mobile cameras, logging over 100 million vehicle movements daily. The data is used by police, HMRC, immigration enforcement, trading standards and even the Pensions Regulator, and records are usually held for a year. US camera firm Flock, by contrast, tells its customers to delete data within a week.

ANPR was mainly used to check a specific car or incident. The AI tool reverses that: it scans all journeys and flags vehicles for investigation. When TBIJ first exposed it last year, three of the regional units that tackle organised crime were piloting it against county lines drug networks. Then called ANPR Find and Profile, it has been renamed the ANPR Analytics Tool.

The Home Office says the tool neither profiles people or vehicles nor makes automated decisions, and that the original name did not reflect what it does. The Home Office, police forces and the National Police Chiefs’ Council have refused or failed to answer TBIJ’s FOI requests about how it works. Ruling on one of TBIJ’s appeals, the Information Commissioner observed that people uninvolved in crime “may have their journeys tracked or monitored”.

Why it matters

Amina Fahmy of Privacy International argues that AI flips the old order: rather than starting with suspicion, police can ask the model to find it in data already collected. TBIJ found ANPR raised in only three Commons debates in the past year, none on surveillance. Compare the attention police facial recognition has received, as we reported on 5 November. In our view, the case for a clear legal footing for AI analysis of ANPR data is at least as strong, given its scale.

Looking Forward

The contract’s stated aim is national adoption. Watch for whether any new rules on police use of AI are drafted widely enough to cover searches of vehicle data, or whether ANPR analytics expands without a dedicated legal basis.