It happened in a flash outside Barclays in Croydon town centre. A digital trap snapped shut around one of Britain’s thousands of wanted criminals. In little over a minute, a combination of high-definition cameras, automated AI face scanning and half a dozen police officers had run a wanted man to ground. After the handcuffs clicked shut, the Metropolitan police’s controversial live facial recognition (LFR) cameras had chalked up another arrest: the fifth in 45 minutes on a regular Thursday morning. The arrest was one of hundreds made during a six-month Met police pilot of LFR cameras on vans and fixed to lamp-posts, as also seen across cities in China, the UAE, India and Israel. Critics have called the technology invasive, unregulated and anti-democratic, cited studies suggesting racial bias and called for it to be scrapped. But the Met police commissioner, Mark Rowley, has said it is “gamechanging” and keeps the public safe. The trap was set at 10am, when the clusters of surveillance cameras mounted high on pillars at the junction of Church Street and North End were switched on. Standing nearby was Kevin Brown, a plain-clothes police sergeant. The wanted man unwittingly walked past one of the cameras and instantaneously Sgt Brown’s handheld beeped furiously and flashed up the suspect’s pin-sharp live photo, alongside a previous custody photo, his name, the suspected crime and warnings of any weapons or drugs risk. Every face passing the cameras – as many as 5,000 an hour – was being scanned and its biometric data streamed live to a police operations room five miles away in Sydenham. There, an AI-powered system, supplied by the Japanese tech company NEC, checked it instantly against photos of wanted suspects and people under court orders. Brown had a match. Uniformed officers standing across the road received the