Australia's First Live Face-Scanning Police Trial Has Already Checked 130,000 People. Experts Are Alarmed.

Key points

• Western Australia Police scanned more than 130,000 faces in Perth and Fremantle during the first week of the trial, which began in June 2025.
• The system compared faces against a watchlist of roughly 4,000 people and triggered 33 alerts, leading to 18 arrests in that opening week.
• One false match, meaning the system wrongly flagged an innocent person as a suspect, was recorded in that first week.
• WA's Office of the Information Commissioner said it was not invited to any meaningful consultation before the trial launched.
• Researchers warn the underlying algorithm may perform worse on First Nations faces, a concern police have not publicly addressed.

Western Australia Police is running the country's first live facial recognition trial on public streets, and the rollout has drawn sharp criticism from privacy researchers, Aboriginal legal advocates, and the state's own independent watchdog.

The trial uses NEC Corporation's Neoface m40 system, a one-to-many facial recognition tool. That means cameras scan every face that passes in front of them, then instantly compare each face to a database of people police want to find, rather than simply confirming whether one specific person is who they claim to be. Officers monitor results from a van parked nearby.

In the first week alone, more than 130,000 people were scanned across Perth and Fremantle without being stopped or asked.

What did the trial actually find?

The system generated 33 alerts and led to 18 arrests in its first week. One person was falsely identified as being on the watchlist, meaning the software incorrectly matched an innocent bystander to a suspect's file. Police described that rate as better than a comparable 2023 trial in the United Kingdom using the same NEC algorithm.

The watchlist holds roughly 4,000 people: individuals accused of serious offences, missing persons, and people considered a risk to themselves or others. WA Police have not released further data since that first week, saying more statistics will come "in a co-ordinated matter."

Could the technology get the wrong person?

Yes, and researchers say certain groups face a higher risk of being wrongly flagged. Melbourne Law School associate professor Jake Goldenfein explained that facial recognition algorithms are typically trained on datasets that skew heavily toward white male faces. That imbalance means the software tends to be less accurate when it scans women, people of colour, and especially women of colour.

The UK National Physical Laboratory study that WA Police cited when choosing the NEC product found no statistically significant accuracy gap by gender or ethnicity, but only under controlled conditions. Accuracy dropped when real-world factors came in: poor lighting, varying skin tone, different camera angles, or a subject's age. Michael Birtwisle of the Ada Lovelace Institute in London, who gave evidence to a 2023 UK parliamentary inquiry on police facial recognition, told the ABC that Australian police cannot simply borrow British trial data, particularly because NEC's system has not been publicly confirmed as tested or trained on First Nations faces. WA Police did not answer a direct question on that point.

Were Aboriginal communities consulted?

Not meaningfully, according to the Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia (ALSWA). Its legal services director, Peter Collins, learned about the trial through a brief email from a police superintendent asking for a 20-minute meeting two days before the launch.

"This was a done deal from the get go," Collins said.

Collins argues the trial locations were chosen in areas where Aboriginal residents and visitors are concentrated, a claim WA Police deny, saying sites are selected on policing need alone. WA Police's own privacy impact assessment stated the trial would not "primarily or especially affect Aboriginal people," a conclusion Collins called a "tick a box exercise."

The state's privacy regulator, the Office of the Information Commissioner, publicly warned in July that running a program of this scale without proper guardrails carries serious risks. It confirmed it was not included in any meaningful consultation before the trial began.

For ordinary people walking through central Perth or Fremantle: if you were in those areas since June, your face was almost certainly scanned. Police say images of people not on the watchlist are deleted almost immediately and appear pixelated even to officers. Whether that deletion actually happens, and how quickly, is difficult to verify independently given the limited data released so far.

Privacy expert John Pane of Electronic Frontiers Australia said the consultation problem is real, but the deeper issue is the law itself. The current framework, he argued, hands police sweeping powers with little independent oversight. He believes the state's privacy legislation needs urgent amendment to keep pace with what the technology can now do.