Police Scan 20,000 Faces at The Lexicon

Police scanned more than 20,000 shoppers' faces at The Lexicon in Bracknell during facial recognition trials, it has been announced.

Thames Valley Police have been using live facial recognition (LFR) vans to park up and scan crowds for a "watch list" of suspects.

A local paper trailed a deployment on March 5, with a specialist team working alongside neighbourhood officers to identify known offenders.

Superintendent Helen Kenny said: "We've used really new tactics like our live facial recognition vans."

Police say the technology is tightly controlled: images that do not trigger an alert are turned into biometric templates and automatically deleted within seconds, while any possible match is checked by an officer before action is taken.

The force's Police and Crime Commissioner called LFR "an additional tool to cut crime and catch criminals", pointing to arrests in other forces for offences including rape, domestic abuse and robbery.

But civil liberties campaigners warn ordinary shoppers are being scanned without meaningful consent. Big Brother Watch says live facial recognition "makes us a nation of suspects" and has backed legal challenges after a series of misidentifications.

In one case a 19‑year‑old woman known as "Sara" was wrongly flagged, searched and publicly thrown out of a store before the company later admitted she had been misidentified. A community worker was also wrongly stopped and questioned after being misidentified by the Met's system.

Campaigners say scanning tens of thousands of faces in places like The Lexicon amounts to "unprecedented" mass surveillance and risks disproportionately misidentifying people from minorities.

Thames Valley Police say they will continue to use LFR "regularly" across the force area as part of a national push backed by the Home Office.

Ted O'Neill, Local Democracy Reporter