The fact the police could do something in the name of solving crime doesn’t mean they should. The police could, if we allowed them to, fingerprint every single one of us after a murder. They could check all our bank accounts for stolen money. They could look at all our internet histories for illegal content. Doing these things would help catch criminals and reduce crime. But the right to prevent the police going too far matters just as much as the duty of the police to investigate crime. More. It matters more.

I accept, obviously, that balancing rights and duties isn’t easy but what we shouldn’t accept is leaving it up to the police. You may remember the case earlier this year of the preacher Angus Cameron, arrested in Glasgow for breach of the peace. He also had a “non-crime hate incident” logged against him but he sued and won and quite right too: it’s not, and shouldn’t be, illegal to publicly quote from the Bible. And in case you think cases like that don’t matter so much now that the hate crime legislation has been such a flop and a non-event, the law is still open to confusion and abuse, like all bad, vague laws. The danger is still there.

Something similar, I think, applies to the use of facial recognition technology, which Police Scotland have taken to with the enthusiasm of a 13-year-old boy given an Xbox for Christmas. What the recent figures show is that searches of the facial matching function on the police database rose from under 1,300 in 2018 to nearly 4,000 in 2022 and is still rising: more than 2,000 searches were carried out in the first four months of 2023. In fact, Police Scotland isn’t far behind the Met so you can see the direction of travel here.

Scotland’s Chief Constable, Jo Farrell, is also pretty clear about her enthusiasm for the technology. It can help take violent criminals off the street quicker, she says, and keep children........

© Herald Scotland