We give our police significant powers in order to (supposedly) protect the public. But these powers are meant to come with oversight to prevent abuse, either from the judiciary (when issuing warrants), or from parliament and the public (due to annual reporting on their use).
Now capitalism has given them the ability to sidestep that oversight through contracts with private surveillance companies like Auror. And there's significant evidence that police are abusing that capability, and violating their own restrictions on their use. So are the police actually checking? Of course not!
The police say they have not been looking into deliberate misuse of vehicle-spotting cameras by officers despite reports suggesting there had been some, perhaps even tracking, that broke the rules.Its almost as if they're deliberately looking the other way, to allow circumvention and abuse by their own.Police use of privately-owned automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems jumped almost 50 percent in the year to mid-2024, to over 500,000 times.
Over 8000 officers can access the two systems, which when they enter a number plate can return up to 60 days of footage of the vehicle caught on ANPR cameras.
Newly released internal reports showed "significant" use by staff indicating they were putting the same number plate in again and again.
"This may circumvent the platform's normal controls for the use of ANPR in a tracking context," Police's chief assurance officer Mike Webb warned a camera technology assurance committee meeting last November.
Its a perfect example of why we need greater controls on private surveillance, and the ability of government agencies to access it. Because the police being able to track people in real time and uncover every aspect of your personal life is a very different thing from an advertiser doing it. The latter can only try and sell you shit; the former can assault, arrest, imprison, or even kill you. The best move would be to outlaw such invasive private surveillance, but if we are not going to do that, we should absolutely forbid its use by state agencies without a warrant, a criminalise the "leaking" of data to them. As the above shows, our watchmen aren't going to watch themselves. So its time we did it for them.
