Sanjana Varghese in The Baffler:
IN LINCOLNSHIRE, ENGLAND, the local police force has indicated that they will be testing out a kind of “emotion recognition” technology on CCTV footage which they collect around Gainsborough, a town in the county. Lincolnshire’s police and crime commissioner, Marc Jones, secured funding from the UK Home Office for this project, but the exact system that the police will use, and its exact supplier, are still not confirmed. All that the police force knows is that they want to use it.
It may seem like an overreach for a provincial police force to roll out a nebulous new technology, even the description of which sounds sinister, but I’ve started to think there is a less obvious reason behind their choice. Facial recognition has been the subject of much scrutiny and regulation; in the UK, a man named Ed Bridges took the South Wales Police to court over the use of automated facial recognition and won. But the South Wales Police force has indicated that they will continue to use their system, with the chief constable Matt Jukes saying that he was “confident this is a judgement we can work with.”
More here.