I joined GMP officers in the town centre to see how live facial recognition was being used to identify suspects and protect the public, with several sex offenders identified. As part of Greater Manchester Police’s (GMP) Operation Avro, a "day of action" was held across Oldham on Thursday (July 23), targeting crime through a mix of enforcement activity, community engagement and new technology. Earlier in the day, I had accompanied the force on a raid, in which a cannabis farm was uncovered in Fitton Hill, and attended a traffic stop checkpoint where an illegal bike was seized, and new technology was used to test for drugs. After that, I headed to the town centre to see facial recognition in action, and the impact it has. Two live facial recognition (LFR) vans were parked in Market Place in the town centre, one outside Rhode Island Coffee and the other outside Costa Coffee, as part of the force’s wider clampdown in the borough. Inside one of the vans, Sergeant Lockett explained how the technology works. The cameras scan the biometric features of faces in real-time and compare them to a watchlist uploaded to the van’s computer system. If there’s a match, the system alerts officers, who manually review the footage to confirm the identification. Sergeant Lockett said: "So, if you walk into the detection zone and you're not on the watchlist, then the camera takes a biological template of your face, similar to your fingerprints. "If you're not on the watchlist, it will delete immediately, within, on average, 0.2 seconds. "We get a lot of people saying 'oh well, it doesn't really delete though does it?' "Myself, who has been trained in it as well as my other officers, we really can't retrieve that." He added the system is completely standalone and