WA Police live facial recognition trial leads to 122 arrests

Western Australia Police says that its five-month live facial recognition trial scanned 1,380,882 faces and led to 122 arrests. It also raised nine incorrect alerts.

  • 2 for an organization

    The force reports 122 arrests from the trial’s alerts, with nine incorrect alerts in 1,380,882 scans.

  • Not rated for society

    The sources give no measure of crime or safety for the public, and the arrests have not yet reached court outcomes.

Depth runs from 1, a small gain, to 5, survival.

Status
Realized benefit.
Evidence

foundstudiedreportedclaimed

Only the deployer supports the benefit.

Certainty

Very low.

Starts very low because no comparison was measured.

Size

No magnitude yet. These inputs are not documented:

  • reach
  • distribution
The system’s part
Not isolated. The force credits the alerts with the arrests but gives no comparison with policing without the system.
Limits
The force had not yet published its evaluation of the trial. The figures are its own, and none compares policing with and without the system.
Trade-offs
The system raised nine incorrect alerts in 1,380,882 scans, and officers engaged with each person wrongly flagged.
Learns from data

Not shown. The reports describe face matching but not how the system was built.

Later
Nothing later is known. The benefit was first reported on 2 November 2026, and no later report was found.

Download data Cite Suggest a correction

System
Live facial recognition in police vans
Used by
Western Australia Police
Where
Western Australia, Australia
Stage
In a pilot
Date
, when the source was published
Kind
Aggregate result
Broad benefit
Physical health (crime reduction or prevention)

Sources

  1. News report, based on the account of the organization that used it.

    ID Tech, 2 November 2026.

    Western Australia Police says its five-month live facial recognition trial scanned 1,380,882 faces and led to 122 arrests before it ended on Oct. 31.
    A police spokesperson said the system generated nine incorrect alerts across the 1.38 million scans, which the force described as an error rate of 0.00065 percent.

  2. News report, based on the account of the organization that used it.

    Diario del Sur, 2 November 2026.

    La Policía de Australia Occidental presentó los resultados de un programa piloto de reconocimiento facial en tiempo real que permitió escanear 1.380.882 rostros y registrar 122 detenciones durante cinco meses de funcionamiento.Translation: Western Australia Police presented the results of a real-time facial recognition pilot program that scanned 1,380,882 faces and recorded 122 arrests over five months of operation.

Details

AI system

Workflow

Cameras in police vans that compare passing faces with a watch list. Officers who check each alert before they act.

Follow-up

Conditions for replication

The watch list must be accurate and lawful. Officers must check each alert, since the system raised incorrect ones.

The entry

Sector

Policing.

Purpose

Western Australia Police tested live facial recognition to find wanted people in public places.

Cite this benefit

Peter H. Vartanian. (2026). WA Police live facial recognition trial leads to 122 arrests (AIBD-1233). Artificial Intelligence Benefits Database. https://petervartanian.xyz/aibd/records/AIBD-1233.html (archived at https://doi.org/10.57967/hf/11470)

BibTeX Data What the fields mean