Police use facial recognition to scan one million faces in WA trial leading to 122 arrests

Deployments of surveillance vans over five months resulted in nine false alerts and led officers to engage with 146 registered sex offenders

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More than a million people have had their faces scanned in a trial of real-time facial recognition technology in Western Australia, resulting in 122 arrests and nine incorrect alerts.

WA police said under the five-month trial, which concluded on Saturday, the technology scanned 1,380,882 faces after 100 deployments across 43 regional and metropolitan locations.