What the Document Is
This is the approved judgment of the Court of Appeal (Civil Division) in R (Bridges) v Chief Constable of South Wales Police, neutral citation EWCA Civ 1058, dated 11 August 2020. It was handed down by Sir Terence Etherton MR, Dame Victoria Sharp PQBD and Lord Justice Singh, and was published by The Judiciary. It is an appeal from the Divisional Court's decision of 4 September 2019 and concerns the lawfulness of live automated facial recognition ("AFR") technology, specifically the system called AFR Locate, used by South Wales Police.
Background to the Case
- Edward Bridges, a civil liberties campaigner from Cardiff, was supported by Liberty in bringing the judicial review claim.
- The technology was used on 21 December 2017 at Queen Street, Cardiff, and on 27 March 2018 at the Defence Exhibition at the Motorpoint Arena.
- SWP deployed AFR Locate on about 50 occasions between May 2017 and April 2019, and the judgment notes that around 500,000 faces may have been scanned over the 50 deployments in 2017 and 2018.
- Interveners included the Information Commissioner, the Surveillance Camera Commissioner and the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Wales.
How the System Works
- The judgment, drawing on the Divisional Court's account, describes six technical stages: compiling a watchlist, facial image acquisition, face detection, feature extraction, face comparison and matching.
- Watchlists were typically 400 to 800 people, drawn mainly from custody photographs, and the maximum capacity was 2,000 images.
- Data for non-matched faces is immediately deleted, while CCTV feeds are kept for 31 days.
Method and Reasoning
- The Court largely adopted the Divisional Court's factual account, which no party criticised, and reviewed the grounds of appeal in turn.
- It addressed five grounds: whether the interference was in accordance with the law under Article 8(2), proportionality, compliance with section 64 of the Data Protection Act 2018 (the impact assessment), compliance with section 42 (the appropriate policy document), and the Public Sector Equality Duty.
- It considered the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice, the Data Protection Act 2018 and SWP's local policies as the legal framework.
Key Findings
- The Court allowed the appeal on Ground 1, finding that the legal framework did not sufficiently constrain police discretion over who could be placed on a watchlist and where AFR could be deployed.
- It found the "intelligence" category of watchlist inclusion to leave too broad a discretion to individual officers, and said no guidance set out where deployment could take place.
- It allowed Ground 3, finding the impact assessment failed to assess risks to data subjects as required by section 64.
- It rejected Grounds 2, 4 and 5. On Ground 2 it held that the impact on each affected member of the public was as negligible as on the Appellant and that the balancing exercise is not mathematical.
- It noted that the Information Commissioner published guidance on section 42 documents on 4 November 2019, and that SWP revised its policy document in response.
Why It Matters for Facial Recognition Policing
The judgment states what the law requires of police forces using live facial recognition, namely clear published rules on who may be placed on a watchlist and where deployment may occur. It is addressed to the parties and to forces and regulators considering the technology's use, and it frames its findings as limited to the particular deployments and the local deployment of AFR Locate in South Wales.