CIVIL rights organisations urged London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan today to drop plans to use permanent live facial recognition cameras in Britain’s busiest shopping street.

Mr Khan has indicated that a planned expansion of the use of permanent live facial recognition (LFR) infrastructure in the capital will include the newly pedestrianised Oxford Street.

It would be among the first areas in the country to use cameras attached to street infrastructure, rather than temporary police vans, to scan the faces of people passing and compare them with a watchlist of wanted suspects.

Stand Up To Racism co-convener Weyman Bennett warned that the state was “deploying a technology with known racial blind spots within a policing system that already disproportionately targets black communities.”

“At a time when we know all too well that the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement remained unanswered, and when institutional racism and the violent racist injustices it called out still remain systemic in society, the introduction of facial recognition cameras into the capital’s busiest street is not just a breach of all our civil liberties,” he said.

Liberty’s Ruth Ehrlich added: “The government has promised a legal framework for live facial recognition. The Met should not be rolling out more of this technology before that framework is in place.

“Permanent cameras on Oxford Street would be a significant escalation in our nation’s capital.”

Jasleen Chaggar, from the campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: “Plans to turn the newly walkable Oxford Street into a permanent digital police line-up using live facial recognition software would be a mistake.

“Innocent Londoners who are not suspected of any crime by the police should be able to wander around public spaces without identifying themselves to the authorities.

“A face scan is as unique as a fingerprint. The police cannot take your fingerprints when you are not suspected of wrongdoing. Taking a faceprint is no less intrusive just because it happens remotely.

“The West End rivals the best cities in the world for its culture and nightlife. The mayor should abandon the plans to roll out Orwellian biometric software which would instead place London in the company of authoritarian regimes.”

Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has described LFR as “one of the most revolutionary technology advances in policing in recent years.”