Western Australia Police have launched a five-month mobile trial of real-time facial recognition technology, the first of its kind for law enforcement in Australia. The trial, which uses a camera mounted on a marked police van, can scan hundreds of faces per minute, cross-referencing them against a database of about 4,000 individuals, including those with outstanding arrest warrants, registered child sexual abuse offenders, and missing persons.
Live demonstration leads to arrest
The trial debuted publicly on 2 July at Perth's Mirrabooka bus station during a media conference held by Police Commissioner Col Blanch. As Blanch spoke to reporters, the system generated an alert, leading to the arrest of a woman wanted for failing to appear in court. "Been happening all week," Blanch said. "I'd love to say I planned that, but I think that's exactly what the technology is... People are being arrested because they are wanted."
In its first week, the single van scanned more than 130,000 faces in crowded public spaces, generating 33 alerts that resulted in 19 arrests. The technology also prompted two welfare checks and identified 21 registered sex offenders who were "engaged with" by officers.
Privacy watchdog raises concerns
The Office of the Information Commissioner WA (OIC WA), the state's independent privacy watchdog, said it was not involved in implementing the trial and warned of "collective privacy harms." "The OIC WA is aware of the trial but was not invited to participate in any formal consultation process with WA Police and did not provide input into the design of the trial," it said in a statement.
Commissioner Blanch defended the technology, stating that the van displays visible signage and does not retain data on ordinary citizens, pixelating people not in the database. "This is not about mass surveillance," he said. "This is about specifying those in the community who are wanted by police... This is actually a way that we can increase the freedoms and the privacy of our community. This is less of an intrusive capability than a standard CCTV camera."
However, the OIC WA challenged the claim that short-term processing exempted the technology from scrutiny, noting that "even where this information is only held for a very short time, it is still a collection and obligations attach to that activity."
Accuracy and bias concerns
Police acknowledged two false alerts during the first week, relying on a "human in the loop" to manually verify matches before acting. Experts warn that real-world environments degrade accuracy. Prof Katina Michael, an expert in biometric surveillance at the University of Sydney, said: "The devil is in the detail, with accuracy dropping to about 90% to 95% in uncontrolled conditions. Factors like variable lighting, crowd density, camera angles, motion blur, and the weather... error rates increase according to the amount of 'noise' in the environment."
Dr Adam Andreotta, a business ethics lecturer at Curtin University, added: "When thousands of people walk by, a 10% mistake rate is obviously not good, it means a significant number of innocent people could be stopped, questioned or detained for things they didn't do."
Algorithmic bias is a primary concern. Independent tests by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology have shown that many facial recognition algorithms suffer from significantly higher false-match rates for women, younger people, and individuals with darker skin tones. Prof Dali Kaafar, executive director of the Macquarie University cyber security hub, stated: "Multiple studies show African and Asian faces are wrongly matched at rates 10 to 100 times higher than white faces on some systems." In an Australian context, this bias could disproportionately impact Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
Function creep fears
Critics and regulators are concerned about "function creep"—the gradual expansion of the technology's deployment. The OIC WA warns that shifting the trial towards covert deployments or integrating it into widespread fixed CCTV networks would "significantly increase privacy risks." Prof Michael noted that Australia lacks federal or state legislation strictly dedicated to police live biometric surveillance, making expansion a "foreseeable risk."
Commissioner Blanch has refused to rule out using the van at public protests, saying it would depend on intelligence regarding significant risks of harm. Kaafar warned: "Once real-time face-scanning is normalised at major events, expanding it to protests, then to routine deployment, then to covert deployment becomes a matter of policy nudges rather than a fundamental shift."
Legal and regulatory context
The trial serves as an early test for Western Australia's Privacy and Responsible Information Sharing Act 2024, the first law in Australia to explicitly regulate automated decision-making. Under the act, WA police must assess risks of bias, harm, and discrimination and complete a formal privacy impact assessment for high-risk projects. The OIC WA is now actively monitoring and requesting information from police to ensure compliance.
Unlike retail shoppers, who can choose not to patronise stores using facial recognition, people in public spaces cannot easily opt out. Andreotta said: "You can't just tell people it is happening via a sign. If the public doesn't fully understand the long-term risks of biometric collection and function creep, they aren't giving meaningful consent." The WA government says results from each deployment will be uploaded publicly as they become available.
