R (Bridges) v South Wales Police — the Court of Appeal Ruling That Set Legal Preconditions for Live Facial Recognition

South Wales Police (SWP) trialled live automated facial recognition (AFR Locate) at around 50 public deployments between May 2017 and April 2019. The system can scan about 50 faces per second; an estimated 500,000 faces may have been scanned across the 2017-2018 deployments. Edward Bridges, who was near two Cardiff deployments (one at a protest at an arms fair), brought a judicial review. The Divisional Court dismissed the claim on 4 September 2019.
On appeal, the Court of Appeal ([2020] EWCA Civ 1058, August 2020) upheld three grounds: (1) the use was not 'in accordance with the law' under Article 8(2) ECHR because the framework left too much discretion to officers over who could be placed on a watchlist and where AFR could be deployed; (2) the data protection impact assessment was deficient because it was written on the premise that Article 8 was not infringed; and (3) SWP breached the Public Sector Equality Duty because it never took reasonable steps to check whether the software was biased on grounds of race or sex. The proportionality ground failed, and there was no clear evidence the software was in fact biased.
SWP did not seek to appeal. The case is a cautionary reference for any public body deploying biometric AI: it shows which legal groundwork (clear statutory or policy rules, a sound impact assessment and bias testing) must exist before deployment, but it provides no evidence on operational effectiveness.

Read the full analysis: https://inforrm.org/2020/08/17/case-law-r-on-the-application-of-bridges-v-chief-constable-of-south-wales-police-use-of-automatic-facial-recognition-technology-unlawful-hugh-tomlinson-qc/