Unreliable Facial Recognition Technology Will Soon Be Used by Police Nationwide The Western Australia Police Force announced on 19 June 2026 that it is trialling the use of live facial recognition technology to randomly scan people passing through public areas to potentially match them in real time to a watchlist containing facial images of people law enforcement is looking for. And this quiet little development likely presages continentwide use of the technology. WA police are trialling live facial recognition using vans deployed to public places. The cameras are attached to the vehicle or a stand beside it. The van states that police are using live facial recognition and there is additional signage notifying passersby. Officers with computer equipment are inside the van. And the watchlist contains 4,000 photos: some of suspects, while others are missing persons. Ten van deployments took place across a number of Boorloo-Perth districts over the first seven days of the trial. WAPOL states that it scanned 131,478 civilians, which generated 33 alerts, one of which was a false positive detection. Eighteen arrests had taken place, 21 sex offenders were identified and engaged with, while two welfare checks took place and an assault incident in a mall was foiled. The trialling of live facial recognition in WA is rather unobtrusive. It will garner much less national attention than if New South Wales police attempted it. This method of introduction also avoids the pushback that the now defunct 2017 Turnbull government proposal to establish a national facial recognition system, which sought to match civilian ID photos with CCTV images in real time, received. WA police commissioner Col Blanch last month explained, “This is the first time in Australia that we will be using this technology. But it is used in other jurisdictions, particularly in the UK.” Yet, the